interview with Aaron Hall

[abkaiser]

Greetings all,

I've just posted an interview with Aaron on my website. Thought I'd advertise it here, as I'm guessing a few of you might be interested:

http://www.andybrain.com/extras/aaro..._interview.htm

Thanks,

Andy

[Ed Kolis]

Hey, cool... maybe this will get some more publicity for SE5!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Weeee!

[abkaiser]

Ed Kolis said:
Hey, cool... maybe this will get some more publicity for SE5!

That's one of my hopes exactly. Aaron and the game series deserves all the support we can give it.

Here's to being *very* excited about the new game!

Andy

[Caduceus]

What does this mean?

Though our plan for SE5 is to make the AI scripts external!

[Fyron]

It means placing the functions used by the AI to determine actions in user editable text files instead of being hidden within the game code.

[Ed Kolis]

Pretty sure that means "put 'em where the modders can get at 'em"

In other words, instead of plugging numbers into predefined algorithms like you do in SE4, you could actually write your own AI code in some sort of scripting language (maybe Python or Javascript?)

pseudo code follows:
Code:

---

if enemy.shipCount > 100

{

  for p in planets

  {

    if p.buildRate > 5000

      p.build("doomStar")

    else

      p.build("spaceYard")

  }

}

else

{

  for p in planets

    p.build("mineralMiner")

}

---

Or, if you're in a particularly sadistic mood, you could try this AI:

http://www.comedycode.com/showcode.cfm/code/28.html

edit: drat, Fyron was faster... stupid examples

[boran_blok]

would be damnd great.

[Aiken]

Superb code Ed

Though, if-elif-else's are nice for simple finite state machines, they're not sufficient to write something decent. I seriously hope it will be possible to code a bayesian networks (or even implement a genetic algos!!) with this scriptining language.

/me crosses fingers

[abkaiser]

aiken said:
Though, if-then's are nice for simple finite state machines, they're not sufficient to write something decent.

I'll sidetrack slightly here and say you *can* do cool stuff with if-thens. It's similar to what chess software like Chessmaster uses - you're just comparing your move with other possible moves, and seeing which scores higher. The difference is - do you have a static routine or a recursive one? From what I understood from Aaron, static routines will perform as we see in Space Empires today. Recursive routines will be able to reach exponentially more complex levels of competition. In AI terms, this comes out to AIs with brutally effective long term plans that can change dynamically (and still maintain effectiveness) as opponents react.

Anyway, that's why I asked him the question: I want to see how "deep thinking" Aaron intends/wants to make the AI. It's obvious he cares a lot about it, but changing from an if-then to a resursive lookahead design would be major, major work. You'd also be introducing complexity that could affect game speed, requiring tighter CPU and memory requirements.

Andy