Closed Alpha Test & Deth..
Re: AI noncombatant traffic
I was thinking about this today and came up with possible solutions to a couple problems with the straight and circular paths, specifically the lack of randomization of the traffic. One possible solution, assuming we're using objects moving in straight paths, we could use an object spawner on a rotational bundle that is rotating back and forth through an arc similar to the way the auto-turrets work in vanilla 2142 and the "traffic" would spawn at different points of the arc such that they would be taking different paths each spawn. You could have several of these rotating object spawners at different parts of the edges of the maps at varying altitudes to give the effect of having lots of traffic over a locale such as Cloud City that doesn't look completely scripted.
For a place like Mos Eisley or Mos Espa, you probably wouldn't have air traffic like a locale such as Coruscant or Cloud City, instead most of the traffic would probably be spacecraft leaving from the spaceport docking bays, or land based traffic so straight paths would either look silly (star wars spacecraft don't take off straight up) or just plain wouldn't work (Mos Eisley and Mos Espa don't have many straight streets so traffic would run into buildings eventually). However, you could probably make and effective spacecraft takeoff using a rotational bundle with a very very large radius and clever placement in a docking bay that is inaccessable to infantry.
Just some ideas on implentation, I'd love to see this feature make it into some of our final maps, but only on an appropriate level, using this to excess would probably make the atmosphere worse rather than better. As some people have noted, during large scale conflicts, most civilians evacuate the war zone so I dunno how much civilian traffic we would actually see during a conflict in the star wars universe.
