how do most people handle the different ai attack waves? like its easy to make an enemy ship fly from one side of the screen to the other, but how do people go about making them go in circles and zig zags etc etc? i have tried this once before by trying to get some sort of input from the mouse to create my own specific attack waves, but the mouse was too slow. I was thinking today what if i used a 2 colour bitmap image and followed the line i would draw in a paint program. and determined my own random speed when my game was running? but then i was thinking how could i get it to understand overlapped areas like a circle in the bitmap etc? Does anyone have any ideas how i could go about this? Thanks for your time.... Werdy666

Basicly use 2D bienzer(sp?) pathways...look at some vector image editors software (Adobe illustraitor)...essentualy this allows you to set two points (starting, ending) and define a curved pathway between the two...then useing a pathway interpolation routine (coupled with the time you set for the object to travel from start to end points) the engine can calculate the specific location for a object along the curved path...further this can be part of a AI scripting routine...for example the object can follow a set path, and when it reaches the end point it can check for a specific condition...if true then is follows another path...if false it follows a third pathway...also such conditions need not be checked at the starting/ending nodes of a pathway, they can be checked while the object is running through the pathway as well..