Do people think that fighter-to-fighter beams are too powerful in the hands of the player or the AI? Just wondering if the AI is balanced such that that player's ability do dodge enemy fire depends upon the weapon-fired not being instantaneous hits.
This is, in fact, more or less the case. The way it works right now is that the AI is always aiming somewhere in a cone centered directly on the correct place to shoot the player. For high-speed weapons where dodging the projectile once fired is impossible, this means that the chances of being hit depend almost entirely on the size of the cone (based on the AI's accuracy score) and not at all on the ability of the player to dodge.
Put another way: you can currently dodge projectiles if they are slow enough, but you can't dodge the AI's aim. Jinking may avoid a slow projectile, but it will never throw off AI aim. If the AI is going to miss, it will miss whether or not you are trying to avoid fire.
I'm actually working on a solution for this right now, with Diaspora in mind.
The basic idea is that it will be possible to add some lag to the AI's aim, so that if you change directions suddenly it will take the AI a second to adjust. My current plan is to have the amount of lag be configurable as a "max aim update delay" parameter or somesuch, with the actual lag randomly selected between 0 and the specified max. So, if you set a max aim update delay of 2 seconds, it will take the AI up to 2 seconds to compensate when you suddenly change your velocity vector (one second on average).
This may sound a lot like $Predict Position Delay, but as it turns out $Predict Position Delay doesn't affect AI aim at all. As far as I can tell, it only matters when evading another ship or avoiding collisions with them.
