Was going to buy the game and then!

[Endoperez]

Ballbarian said:
While I am at it, here are some links for those interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and how far it has come (and has yet to go):
http://www.gameai.com/
One to check out closely at this site is "Cloak, Dagger, and DNA". It is a Risk like game that uses genetic algorithms. It can be downloaded from that page as well. Very cool.

Indeed. I didn't follow the Cloak, Dagger and DNA path, but found my way to virtual evolution. Program that works as an ecosystem, where raw numbers are processed by program-entities that reproduce affected by mutations. I didn't delve too far into it, but foud a mention that when some developer (or someone using the program in his research) tried destroying all new creatures with positive mutations, they started "playing dead" and still managed to start reproducing faster. Also, while in low- or high-resource environments only one "species" prevails, in certain conditions multiple "species" specialize to use different resources.

Very cool.

[PrinzMegaherz]

Evolution?
What is that?

We are not being thaught something like that at school

[Zooko]

Perhaps instead of working on AI, Illwinter could simply publish and document the format for .2h and .trn files. In fact, it would also help to render them into a more human-readable format instead of binary. Then people could write their own AIs and we could swap them the way we do mods.

Don't tell me that this would enable cheating. Cheating is already enabled, and the only way to disable is to do all consistency checks on the server. This would help the devs disable cheating by making it obvious to everyone how cheating can be done. :-)

[Oversway]

You don't need .2h files to write an AI. The game could provide an api for you to write to.

[Zooko]

It seemed to me that the easiest way for the time-pressed Illwinter devs to make the game "AI-moddable" would be to publish the specification of the .2h file. The alternative of writing an API for the AI-mods to invoke is probably much more time-consuming.

Also, as a potential AI-modder myself I would probably prefer the open .2h files over the API.

Note that this is only for strategic AI mods. For tactical AI mods so that you can configure mages to stop casting Breath of Winter and killing all of their friends, or to cast Aim on the units that actually have ranged weapons instead of on the melee units, or to cast Flying on units that DO NOT ALREADY HAVE FLYING, and so forth, then you would require a different interface.