Ancient Star - basic AI and news screen

With AI infrastructure and news screen, phase one (basic feature implementation) of the project is getting very close to being completed.

Having calculations run in the background and affect UI at the end turned out to be very simple. So now there is AI that controls "bot" players and plays them all in parallel in the background. It has very basic logic for now: build scouts, visit unscouted stars, build colony ships, and colonize everything available. In the future, the logic will be more elaborate and goal oriented.

This required some changes to the code structure. Controller classes players use to read and manipulate the game state have been moved from UI to game core subproject (where game data and game logic is) so in theory, AI can be coded without being a part of an Android application. And the other change was to how a turn is ended. So far the human player had absolute control over the matter but now each player marks their turn as ended. The next turn is processed when all players have ended the turn.

When a certain portion of the map is colonized news screen triggers, informing all players about the event.

 

Again, a simple-looking feature that had more going on under the hood. Now there is a proper concept of player events, uniting tech advances and news items. On a new turn, UI runs through the list of new events, switches to relevant screens, and moves to the galaxy map once all events are cleared.