Please do let us know if there is any way the community can assist with this
Thank you!
I think some of the Combat Chatter dialog is keyed off of the AI ships having certain AI flags happen? I'm not entirely sure. If not, thats something that could be done rather easily I think to give better player feedback.
Correct, there are some exposed AI flags which I believe are indeed used in Combat Chatter or in other mods such as Blothorn's AI Flag Tool which does get a decent amount of use in testing
More flags would potentially enable the community to experiment with various ways of presenting the data, which may potentially eventually inform vanilla solutions
Right, that's workable, but those flags really aren't meant to be player-facing, so it can get pretty iffy. That is, these flags aren't so much indicators of intended courses of action or long-term intent, but rather ways for different modules of the AI to communicate in the moment. For example whether a "back off" flag would be unset in the next few frames or not, you can't really tell from looking at the flags (yes, flags have a "duration", but they can be unset before that expires).
And further, the AI doesn't
generally operate off of long-term plans, but rather off of the current conditions. So "I'm doing X" is just fundamentally "I'm doing X this instant, but may or may not keep doing it" so it's... complicated. I think the only way/reason "barks" like this can work is due to the human propensity to
falsely assign meaning to the AI's actions if the AI "tells" you what it's doing, even if it's not actually doing that. Which, fair enough, it's a reasonable trick to pull out... but then that limits the usefulness of this as a learning aid. Still, may be worth messing with at some point, since it would be quite good if pulled off reasonably well.