8 replies to this topic

[Excedrin]

Just in case anyone here is working on it, I've made an initial pass at modding the skirmish AI for MirageKnight's Rebirth mod.

It's here: http://dow.lerp.com/rebirthai-2.zip

This one has Chaos and Eldar, mostly working as far as I know.

I've entered the building costs, but not addon/research costs for the other races as well.

[LarkinVB]

I had a request by MirageKnight to help him doing the AI for his mod. Did he contact you (Excedrin) already or vice versa ? I checked that Arkhan is listed as a member of the rebirth mod team. Will he do the AI ? Or Thudmeizer ? If all answers are 'no' I may consider giving a hand.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

I was some kind of a freelancer for the rebirth mod before I joined the skirmish AI team. But it had nothing to do with the AI. I was the icon designer !

[Excedrin]

I'm not sure which skirmish AI this is based on, but anyway, here's my current working Rebirth AI, for 0.3.

http://dow.lerp.com/rebirthai-4.zip

Current problems:
Eldar crashes to desktop, possibly because of vyper jump code.
IG full scale war is apparently an invalid research, I'm not sure what causes this.
Most factions won't build all of their units due to incorrect build programs.

[Excedrin]

I've been working on this off and on for a while.. I've revised it 9 times... somewhere around the 6th one, I switched to Relic's base WA AI because I was tired of entering a build program and I wanted to see if the ctd would go away.

So, now I'm "having fun" trying to get the WA AI to do simple stuff like consistently follow a build order and oh, I don't know, avoid leaving half of the army 15 feet away from the fight while the other half dies... It's really great fun.

I'd like to make a formal request to use the latest Skirmish AI as my "core" because I'm not sure exactly what the rules are for using it are. I'm very impressed with Arkhan's latest structure, it's much cleaner and nicer than before. And of course, after trying to start from scratch, I really appreciate all of the stupid Relic bugs that everyone who's contributed to the Skirmish AI has worked around.

In slightly unrelated news, I've significantly improved the way I handle customstats in my WA-based AI, and I'd like to merge this change back into the Skirmish AI since customstats.ai started life as an ugly hack and needs to die.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Excedrin, I'd suggest you to wait 1 - 2 weeks. At this time 1.7 should be released and we've a bit free air. I had to ignore this indirect request for AI assistance simply because I had to focus on finishing 1.7 first. One main purpose of 1.7 is the much easier handling for other mods. This makes life easier for the other modders, but also for us.

Since I've waited for rebirth a long time, did even some freelance icon work and made lots of posts to convince MirageKnight to include the demon prince, I've a personal interest in the rebirth mod. I'll offer you the same I've already done with Thud for Steel Legion: Creating a basic AI based on 1.7 for it.
Since I don't know the rebirth balancing good enough, it won't be as optimized as the skirmish AI 1.7 for WA, but it'll definitely be a lot better than the WA vanilla AI, and you can improve it even further. It helps a lot if you've premade build programs based on AI 1.6 even if they are buggy. I'd need at least the tech trees for all races and the costs. I've manually collected this information in WA, and I won't do it again. It's just too annoying work.

BUT, you have to wait until our 1.7 AI is released! Before it, I have too much pressure.

[Excedrin]

I have scripts that collect most of the info, but I agree, doing it manually sucks bigtime.

Anyway, you didn't really address my questions about including the Skirmish AI or about my improvement to customstats.... I guess I'll continue to work in that direction.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Well, I personally don't have anything against it if you use the 1.7 AI as your new core. Just like I said, one purpose of our AI is to be used by other mods. But you shouldn't make an official release with it as long as we're still in beta. I can't say anything about the custom stats. I've only restructured them a bit, but didn't put their purpose into question.
Anyway, you should ask Thudo about the common rules of our AI implementation since he's the one who normally takes care of the mods including our AI, and keeps my back free, so I can focus on coding the core AI.
If you want to dig in the beta 1.7, I've no problem with that. The more things you figure out yourself, the less work we have.
Make sure that you get my changelog and the race AI guide. Although the changelog is a bit outdated, it contains a lot of important information about the handling with the build programs. If Thud doesn't remove the doc folder, you should have it in the beta 8 upload. (As soon as Thud makes it available!)

[thudo]

I see no problem using the current Advanced AI incarnation. It is still work-in-progress and Rebirth does have custom work to be done. Excedrin - you'll be able to handle the migration fine? I bet you will.

Btw, I am augmenting Arkhan's dox he's provided in the existing Repository and supplementing it with a "mini-tut" so most people can create their own AIs with minimal supervision. Thats the general idea outside of troubleshooting some real nasty mod-specific issues (which I've always corrected or at least had the help of an elite LUA coder.. heheh).

Yep.. such good things are comingt to AI development for DoW/WA. A new rennaisance.

Edited by thudo, 11 February 2006 - 03:56 AM.