[epiar-devel] Infinite Canvas

[Maoserr]

I'm going to be pretty busy over the next 4 months so I won't be able
to contribute much.

I'd just like to comment on the AI updates for far away places.  As far
as I know, there's no need to run AI updates for non-local phenomenon
(we can decide what non-local means later).  Since every AI ship would
presumably have a plan, we can implement a variable update system where
each AI only updates when certain conditions are triggered (E.G. it
meets a hostile ship, or player warps into the quadrant it's in, Or
it needs to change quadrant to the players quadrant etc etc). And those
updates would change the plan accordingly.  We can even back-simulate
events that should have occurred as a result of one of the triggers
(E.G. trader Joe jumps between planet A and planet B, at the beginning
of the game, trader Joe is on planet A, player jumps into planet B at
time=200, causing a trigger to run trader Joe's AI, we can then go
forward 200 ticks in trader Joe's AI plan and figure out if he's
suppose to be there or not).  With back-simulation, we could have a
very large universe without requiring heavy updating every frame as AI
is only updated as necessary.  Just a thought.

I think this could be less memory and CPU intensive.  I'm not quite
sure what those triggers could be (definitely need a time based trigger
and the quadrant based trigger).