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Continuation

The goals are for the final facing (and therefore final formation positions) to be predictable, and for facing to be assumed as quickly as possible, and maintained through the whole trip regardless of anomalies like the player making changes in the formation screen.

To a large degree, some of these rules revert back to old movement rules - each ship gets a move order to a final formation point, instead of wingmen trying to maintain their wing. Those points face directly away from the start point, and ships may have to rotate afterwards to achieve the proper facing. This is all as movement used to be.

The critical differences are that strafing and speed control are used by wingmen to maintain formation even as they point and burn towards their destination, and is also used by the flagship to try to return to a straight-line course between start and end points after a turn.



Now . . . because I personally like shiny and graceful movement . . . I'm thinking right now of a set of rules to do this without implementing strafing. Implementing a new movement TYPE seems to be the most burdensome aspect of this, from a coding perspective. I don't know if these tweaked rules will make this trivial to code up or not. If this is still too much of a crunch in your timeline, you can stop reading now.

Old movement rules again. Upon move, give all three formed-up ships independent move orders to points that are in a formation facing directly away from the start point. As with old movement rules.

Measure the angle from the start point to the end point. Record it for the duration of this move order. For instance, if north on your screen is zero, south is 180, and east/west is 90/270, then moving your fleet due east has the result that you want each member of the fleet to approach from the west of the end point, or about 270 degrees.

Have every ship overcorrect. If they're approaching from 290 degrees - twenty degrees more south than desired, have them overcorrect by 20 degrees. They are approaching moving in a direction of 70 degrees - they would overcorrect by turning and burning at 50 degrees. This overcorrection would reduce bit by bit as they line up with the intended course, until they assume almost exactly the final facing they should be using. Obviously, for short distances, this isn't terribly necessary.

Comine this with turning to almost directly face your destination when move orders are over a short distance, before burning the main engines, and you may have something organic and predictable without having to implement a new movement type.