Ultimate Wish List

[raynor]

If a genie handed me a magic lamp and said I could have the most impossible thing in the world for my favorite game, I would ask for:

Wouldn't it be cool if SE4 had an API so you could write your own AI?

I'm not talking about editing the files like we can do now. No, I'm talking about a complete interface for a computer program to everything that you can see or do as a human player.

I would want to write a program that could query the game for the positions of all my forces/planets and all the other empires forces/plants. Then, my program could make its own calculations and decide where to move stuff.

It will never happen. But I can dream, can't I?

[geoschmo]

Progam a computer to play a computer game. Now that's an interesting idea.

[Baron Munchausen]

You want an AI scripting language instead of the small number of external adjustments we have now. Doable, but it would require MM to rewrite the game. Request it for SE V...

[geoschmo]

No, if I understand what he is wanting, it wouldn't require any sort of change by Malfador at all. What it sounds like he wants to do is have a seperate program that takes the place of a human player in the game. As far as SEIV is concerned it would be another human player, but actually it will be another computer program that is playing the game.

Am I right? It would be doable of course, but extremely complex. Probably take more code than the game itself.

Geoschmo

[ June 09, 2002, 02:54: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[raynor]

Oh, there is no doubt this would be a lot of work any way you look at it. And, the work wouldn't yield any profit because only a few crazy fools like me might take advantage of it.

The simplest way to accomplish what I'm asking for would be for Malfador to document the structure of the savegame and turn files. Then, I could write a program that would let me figure out what was going on in the game by reading the savegame files and programmatically construct a turn file.

Hmm... now that I think about it. I know there is an Open Source Version of Civ called FreeCiv. I wonder if you can write your own AI for it?

[raynor]

In my Last game, I was working at moving colonists around. It was getting kinda tedious so I thought about renaming planets so I could see if what, if any, different atmosphere breathing colonists they needed. So, I was naming all the domed oxygen planets _O - <name> and the domed ones O - name.

Of course, this didn't Last long because the horrible User Interface prompted me to uninstall the game... again.... today!

If I could create my own turn file, then I could write code to say: rename all the domed Methane colonies _M - <name>. Then, if I were really clever, I might write code that calculated the distance between the closest ship with cargo capacity to a world that had Methane breathing colonists on it versus its distance to the colony with the Methane breathers.

Well, as I said, and as you've said, it's pretty doggone complicated and wouldn't yield even 1/100th the cost of adding it to the game. That's why I called it a Wish List.

[capnq]

I thought about renaming planets so I could see if what, if any, different atmosphere breathing colonists they needed

On the (F5) Colonies screen, clicking on the General/Atmosphere column header will sort the list by atmosphere, and the Races button will show the inhabitants.

[raynor]

On the (F5) Colonies screen, clicking on the General/Atmosphere column header will sort the list by atmosphere, and the Races button will show the inhabitants.

Yes. Definitely, this is extremely nice and handy. But it's not enough.

When you have 150+ planets, it would be nice if you could sort by atmosphere type and then by domed/undomed, etc.

I still dunno what possessed me to change the # of systems to 255--way, way too many planets. But I did see an AI creating planets. My compliments to the creator of the Aquilane(sp?) AI.