Unrealistic Expectations

[SpikedHelmet]

Yes and I respect that. Come on, we modders know as well as anyone that there is a horrible unbalancing of supply and demand around the community. Almost every project is short atleast one or two critical expertise -- skinners being the major one, as well as modellers, scripters and data gurus. I haven't really seen anyone complaining that there aren't enough "AIers doing their jobs". There aren't enough AIers period.

Anyway, since you're going on about how "easy it is", I think I'll learn AI bullshit just to prove a point. Now where do I start?

[SpikedHelmet]

Speaking of which, a good place to start would be a fucking explanatory sticky in this thread. All other subforums have important stickies pointing towards knowledge resources.

[AF]

I figured it out by myself back when there were no people to help and devised most of my initial AI logic before there was even an AI interface, as did several other people who had no prior experience.

[SpikedHelmet]

Do you want a cookie or something? I taught myself to model, UV map and texture, which, according to you, are leagues more complicated (even individually) than learning to script AI.

But if you're going to sit there with some rather moronic "I figured it out myself, so should you" attitude, then no wonder there are no people making AIs. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the AI community (and the Spring community in general) would be for you to fuck off to somewhere else.

[DJ]

easy tiger

There is some info available on AI development in the wiki. What language were you wanting to go for? Hugh Perkins did some stirling work on a C# interface. There's someone recently who seems to having a good stab at getting a Java AI working and there's a few AI's in SVN to be looked at. I don't know much but can at least build the AI's out of SVN if you need some help.

Edit see http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=12194 for the Java

[AF]

When one talks to people like sh*t one rarely acquires or holds onto any credibility or respect.

Spiked, making a config file for an AI is far simpler than writting one from scratch. I spent a good deal of time trying to make everything as obvious in your face simple as possible based on the feedback I got from users. There's plenty of information on how to use toolkit scattered across this forum, usually copy pasted into toolkits help tab.

AAI is even simpler, usually a quick rename of a file fixes things.


And I can model uv map and texture. I may not be an expert at it but I understand it.


But I'm not going to help you if your going to keep trying to offend me or interpret everything I say as an insult. For now it seems trying to help s44 will just get me a load of hassle so I'm steering clear for a few months, I don't need this cr*p.

[DJ]

AF, I'm not trying to get at you, the config idea is excellent but we are yet to have a stable release of NTai that can use the configs. Once NTai has proven itself to be stable then you will find people will be more inclined to build configs. Until that point it won't happen.

[AF]

My post wasn't aimed at you DJ.

[DJ]

OK I just don't want anyone who wants to do AI work dissuaded from doing so, we need more AI developers not less or the same ones but pissed off. I can appreciate your frustration with NTai development at the moment, no working dev environment is not going to be condusive to improving your program but your attitude towards some of the people who have the skills to help you suprises me. I don't really follow what goes on in the other forums though...

If spiked once to learn this AI stuff even just to prove a point that's a good thing... I look forward to SpikedAI

[SpikedHelmet]

See, that's the problem, I don't even know the difference between a config file and a... ??? I don't even know what it's called.

And AF, I said what I said because the entirety of this thread you've been talking about how simple AI shit is, how nobody wants to bother with it, and then when I finally decide to give it a try you drop some "figure it out yourself ahahahah" bullshit in my lap, which I don't need.

Anyway, if making a "config" is far easier, then that's obviously what I'd like to do -- there will be no "SpikedAI", tyvm DJ.

So I suppose it's up to me to find out what a config file is and what it looks like...

[DJ]

ah well building a config is much easier, you need to download the toolkit which comes with full package of NTai then update the NTai dll to the latest version. You can then download my config or IK's and see how stuff works. Any probs let me know.

[AF]

Spiked, making an entire AI from scratch isn't easy, building a config to tell an existing AI howto play the game is.

You've been quite aggressive, disrespectful, and offensive in this thread, and I don't want to have to deal with that so I'm steering clear. I don't want to have to deal with someone when even the slightest misunderstanding or wrong syllable could spark off a world war.

[smokingwreckage]

So.... about the knowledge resources Spiked was asking for. Sticky?

AF, by the way, you're right. Lack of AI "singleplayer" is keeping people out of Spring. Nobody I know is competitive enough in any RTS to do anything other than hook up with some mates for a humans VS AI botbash. Of all my mates, I am by FAR the best RTS player overall, and I am not even close to being online-competitive... nor, as a 30 year old with 2 kids, am I able or even interested in committing the time to get that good.

Spring/TA can be an immensely satisfying game for AI-basher gamers. Man, oh man do you get to blow up some shit in TA, and Spring is like that but better. Moreover many of us utter non-leet players are capable of modelling, scripting, texturing or just messing about tweaking configs, but the game has to be fun for us first, and to be fun for us it has to have single player.

[DJ]

+1

I'll write some documentation for it when i get a chance, AF has about a million projects at the moment. In the meantime feel free to ask any questions and i'll answer them.

[AF]

If you have a particular area you'd like insight into I might be able to take a look and magically find a new blog post explaining it.

[hughperkins]

AF, you're doing a good job making sure there is always a working AI for Spring, even when the other AI-developers are off not doing Spring stuff.

You configuration GUI was an excellent idea. I kicked myself for not having thought of doing the same thing

Edit: whoops, seems that's quite an old thread I just ressurrected :-O

[AF]

tbh Im quite sadenned by Toolkit right now because aside from nobody really using it, or having anything to test it with, C# winforms leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. One day I will build a new version into my lobby using Java/swing, which means the usability should rise by several orders of magnitude, and I know much more about Java GUIs so I should be able to take advantage of unitsync and the other lobby code I have and turn it into something much nicer.

[Pxtl]

Honeslty, the only reason I haven't set up NTAI to work with HA yet was because I couldn't begin to find information on how to configure it (albeit I didn't look very hard). Now that I know to look for the toolkit, I'll probably give it a whack when I get the chance.

[AF]

Youd need a working NTai to use it with. If someone can compile you a copy from svn that works with the current version of spring then your ready to go, but I can only build Visual studio builds for svn spring here.