@Moonhead:

1. Engine-Kill calls are in another section of the flight-and-evasion code. I'm at work, so I don't have that section handy at the moment, but the AI definately uses Engine Kill.

2. For a really interesting experience, run the Toolkit as a MP server and play it that way. Notice how much more dangerous the AI becomes! This was one of the more fascinating things I found out... the FL server EXE interprets these AI files much more literally and aggressively than the standard EXE.

3. I really haven't noticed a great deal of difference between AIs, when you put them to the test. I'm a very good flyer (ask all of the people who challenged me to duels, when Warriors of the Sky had a server), so I've torture-tested combat quite a lot, trying to create a real challenge without upping the counts in Encounters to framerate-dropping levels like most mods do, or giving certain ships ridiculous performance stats.

Note that there are three distinct types (Very_Hard is just a clone with changed shooting parameters). Extensive testing didn't show a great deal of variety in their true behaviors, at least in SP- in MP, it becomes more apparant how the various flight styles work. All things said, adding more diversity would be nice, but I built these four profiles to add real, game-balanced difficulty ramps into the game design. A Very_Hard is significantly harder than a Hard, mainly because they shoot more often, shoot for a longer period, and have a lower margin of error. In the end, I found that that made the biggest real difference in AI performance against a well-skilled human player- basically, a good human pilot shoots more accurately than the AI's error radius, and dodges more effectively than any semi-random program ever will.

... just to let y'all know:

The last ShipDealer was added and tested today. Now it's just a matter of code cleanup and a few "small things" and 1.3 will be released. Hoping it's just a week, but it's probably more like two. I've done some very interesting things with this release, lemme tell you!

Here are a few things to expect:

1. The rest of the ships from FL will all be flyable/buyable. Including the Nomad stuff. As usual, these will be pure XML so that people can pretty much just steal the code and be done with putting FL stuff into their mods

2. Reworked docking, to clear up the remaining smallish issues.

3. Customized ALEs, which is a broad category including a number of really nice, subtle changes to the way that things are rendered by the game engine. I'll talk/boast more about that when I get to release, but it's one of the more important new things.

4. Custom Planets. I dunno how far I'm going to take this in this release, but I'm definately including several.

5. At least two more custom ships - my Rogue/Molly VHF project is finally done. The Toolkit is, obviously, not really about adding new things- I just can't help myself, and these are really neato ships. If "neato" means ugly, I mean, hehe...

Several dozen other things that almost don't bear mentioning, like working Tradelane hacks, dynamic light-source gun flares and other tricks

hey Argh, about docking -
why is the docking station's docking sphere defined as berth?the "proceed to dock #1" sounds weird when there's no dock...was it an issue with 'ring' docking?i think you should try this - i find the resulting voice message "proceed to land" much more satisfying

docking_sphere = pad, HpDockMountA, 25
docking_sphere = ring, HpDockMountB, 25

i also used the pad sphere to enable docking on manufacturing_platform_lod.cmp,the undockable mining station

To tell you the truth, I hadn't thought of that one. Thanks- I've already put it into the next build

no problemo