Been a few days, figured I have something to chat about.
Finish implementing dropping and jumping paths.
Update the blocks and connections near any cell that changes as efficiently as possible.
Second one worked way better than I thought it would thanks to good planning. First is proving difficult. Actors will jump from block to block (because they don't really do any thinking on their own), but getting the pre-plotter to recognize proper jumps has me chasing my tail. Along with a noticeable lag time in jump calculations that I think I can clean up. So, still in progress.
After that practical problem, Groups are turning out to be a weird theoretical problem. When you think about it, a Group is a thing that needs to exist within a single area and be able to move around the map with the same rules as the Group's members, but it's not really an "object" in itself.
I find myself stealing a lot of ideas from Dwarf Fortress in deciding how Groups should work. Namely that a group always has to have at least one member, a Group has an anchor point that members try to move to and orbit around, and the Group is the bottom of a three-level organization structure. About that last part: All actors in the game world will be part of three layers of association, basically the same way Dwarf Fortress works. I don't really consider this ripping anything off, because it's a perfectly natural structure. The layers are (names kinda pending) Alignment, Company, and Team.
Alignment is like an Entity in Dwarf Fortress, all the actors that basically share an overall directive and list of relationships toward other Alignments.
Company is like the population of a specific Fortress, except that a Company isn't necessarily tied to one place. This is were production orders, facilities, and most inventory is handled.
And then Team is like a military squad, told to do specific actions like "mine this" and "patrol there", with uniform equipment and schedules. Each Company has a background Team for all the members not assigned to a specific one, which do the tasks assigned to the Company.
The difference between this and Dwarf Fortress, among many many others, is that the Player controls things from the top level instead of just the middle level, in addition to being a character running around in the world that Teams can be ordered to assist. Not to make too much of a comparison, y'know, that's just the idea.
For obvious reasons, I'm just worrying about the Team level grouping for now, and really want to get jumping done first.