TL;DR: GNU GPL v3. Non-Newtonian Space Shooter Engine. Good luck getting it to build.

This was a project for Artificial Intelligence class back in college. I spent two months on a game engine, then remembered it needed AI, and threw together something that actually worked out pretty well and made some interesting emergent behavior.

I enjoyed some certain games as a kid based on movies made by a certain awkward bearded man. I hope I don't get sued for the name of this project. Look, Mickey, I'm just saying - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

After about half of the AI's are killed off in the first few seconds, the remainder are locked into these loops where they can't turn fast enough to hit their target, but they're too dumb to think about trying a diffrent target or a random vector. It's pretty, but ineffective.

Also, if I make them better at breaking these loops, they're going to be a force to be reckoned with. I'll have to tone down the precision of their shooting a bit.

There's another improvement though: the game is currently instagib; that is to say, if the target is in your sights and you mash the button, they're done for instantaneously. It acts too much like real lasers in how quick the effect would be but too little like real lasers in how energetic the effect is. A nice middle ground is fake lasers from sci-fi movies that take time to travel and deal whopping damage upon impact. Maybe they're dense proton beams? But those wouldn't work effectively in an atmosphere, and they WOULD be traveling at relativistic velocities. So the lasers will be fake just like the physics.

Oh yeah, it's totally non-Newtonian. Have you ever played a space shooter that actually uses Newtonian physics? The Real World disappoints once again! In 150 years when the Mars One colony finally revolts for real (not like the fake 2099 Amazon Prime Special Event) we will be lobbing phone poles made of tungsten into absurd orbits to make them smash into each other at high speeds and it'll take years for them to hit their targets. How droll.

So instead take a trip into a fantasy world. Go get CodeBlocks, and the Ogre libraries, and ... damn I can't remember, a bunch of Ogre plugins, you know - get all that set up properly (actually refer to my CodeBlocks project file to get an idea of where they go), upgrade my code to match the Ogre API because they've broken it on me before (pull requests welcome)...

No the better plan is to hop on over to https://github.com/jtickle/fietighter where I am reimplementing this using three.js. Eventually. I like to take my time with things.