3d space ship movement tutorial?

Does anyone have any good articles/link/tutorials on how to program a space to fly in a certain pattern?

what do you mean when you say "a certain pattern"?

well I want to have waves of enemies to follow set paths in 3d space

you mean like a pre programmed coordinate list?

Essentially setting up a list of key coordinates that the ships wold aim for and when they reach one they go to the next aim point?

I mean you could key the points off their initial start position and when they hit the end point they could loop back to the start etc.

Or are you looking for something more AI?

The AI I plan to add in, i.e. if they have just a little shield strength left they will disengage from the attack and bugger off.

What I wondered was how to pre define a path?

You could maybe draw a string of points in a 3d app, and then use blitz to get the vertices from it and create a 3d motion path out of it?

You want splines. There are literally hundreds of pages on splines, but here's a spline editor that Matt McFarland ( who I think goes by Leper here, but I may be confusing two different people ) wrote for just this purpose :

http://www.shmup-dev.com/forum/index.php?topic=26.0

And Diablo's one here :

http://www.shmup-dev.com/forum/index.php&topic=589

Are they in 3d or 2d?

I'll take a look anyhow - thanks for the info...

Those editors are ( I assume ) both for 2d. Splines can be 2d or 3d.

Link dead.

These seem to be 2d splines. Anyone know about 3d splines?

It's easy enought to parent an enemy to a pivot and rotate the pivot in a set pattern. But I want to be able to have loosely coupled enemy and movement, i.e. no pivot fixed in 3d space at say 0,0,0.

For example how did ELITE do it?

It's easy enought to parent an enemy to a pivot and rotate the pivot in a set pattern. But I want to be able to have loosely coupled enemy and movement, i.e. no pivot fixed in 3d space at say 0,0,0.

For example how did ELITE do it?

Well it's also linked from the first link I gave you. You can do it! I have faith in you!

Why not just give every ship a target pivot and after a certain time period or when within a certain distance of the target change it to a new random position. Obviously, for hostiles this target would be the player, until such time as it want's to disengage.

I know it sounds very simple in theory but I used something very similar in my old Zarch remake and it worked very well. Combine that with a FSM system and bobs your uncle.

Stevie

Erm, you could give a brief explanation?

Finite State Machine. Similar to the Ai concepts you've already described.