Over the past several weeks I've implemented a majority of the drone systems for the game. You can now launch drones, and give them the complex commands that the player will be able to accomkplish once they progress in the game (Stopping and harrasing enemies, defending and assiting friendlies). The main idea with the drones is to make them you front-line fighters in combat. They are fairly resilient to attack so you can order them to take on a ship and not have to manage them moment to moment. And they are capable of being buffed by the Chicago's nanopods. As much as possible I'm trying to build an analogy to the wizard with two fighters from a fantasy rpg. The two drone wings are the fighters, they can take and deliever a pounding, and the chicago is the wizard. Taking a more strategic view of the battle and delivering devastating blows where required.



I also made number of very useful utility functions for performing geometry operations on objects in the game, so I'm going to use those to create the visual effects for all of the nano-pods over the next few weeks.

Now that the drones are in I can finish the last part of the tutorial mission and start on the main missions. I'm going to try and get at least three and hopefully more in time for the dream build play competition.

More work on the Shakedown cruise mission. Adding script actions as I need them to get the tutorial up and running. It is nearly complete. I now need to show how to control the drones and then the tutorial will be complete. So now I'm going to spend a period of time working on the drone controls instead of scripting. I have about a half dozen drone commands I need to implement (attack, stop, move to, dock, launch, etc...) Once that is done I can finish up the tutorial mission and start the first combat mission. Time to start making the clan ships!