Help for a complete newbie

Help for a complete newbie

Here is where ideas can be collected for the skirmish AI in development

Moderators: hoijui, Moderators

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Kendis
Posts: 2
Joined: 24 Apr 2006, 21:32

Help for a complete newbie

Post by Kendis »

All,

I stumbled across Spring last week and I have been reading some of the threads and playing a few games against the included AIs to get a sense of the game. I recently reinstalled original TA on my machine and it reminded me of creating AI profiles back in the old days. From what I've read on the forums, it sounds like you need a lot more than just Notepad and some patience to make an AI for Spring and I had some questions I was hoping some kindly soul might answer for me.

I have had some limited exposure to java and a couple courses courses in C++, and I own Visual Basic.NET 2003 (and although I've tooled around with it I'm no expert by any means). My main question is; do I stand a chance at even beginning to try to make my own AI? I'm in the midst of reading the articles hosted by Spring and various other people - I'm hoping it's less a question of ability and more just needing to learn/acquire the appropriate language and software package.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll probably think of some other questions too, but thanks for any help you can give me on this.
Tobi
Spring Developer
Posts: 4598
Joined: 01 Jun 2005, 11:36

Post by Tobi »

Whether you stand a chance or not depends mostly on your motivation. There are quite some people hanging around here who learned C++ just to make their AI.

Anyway, spring gives you just a few C++ interface classes, so you'll have to do all the algorithms yourself and glue everything together to make it work - so you can expect it to be quite a tough job.

As for tools, some version of MSVC should work.
Kendis
Posts: 2
Joined: 24 Apr 2006, 21:32

Post by Kendis »

Thanks for the advice Tobi. I see you are part of the development team? Great job! :o
BIT01
Posts: 16
Joined: 24 Apr 2006, 03:00

Post by BIT01 »

If you are using C++ I like devC++. You can get it at sourceforge.
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Lindir The Green
Posts: 815
Joined: 04 May 2005, 15:09

Post by Lindir The Green »

Codeblocks is better in every way.

And making an AI is hard

You really need to know enough C++ to analyse the game, and then figure out which parts are the AI, and then figure out how to interface with them.

I couldn't do it :cry:
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Dragon45
Posts: 2883
Joined: 16 Aug 2004, 04:36

Post by Dragon45 »

!hard

timeconsuming
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AF
AI Developer
Posts: 20687
Joined: 14 Sep 2004, 11:32

Post by AF »

time consuming yes but hard no...

It depends on how hard you make it for yourself, I never found making ym AI hard, I found minor problems hard but they where solved by other people.

The problem is not that you configure or edit or write the higher level code for the AI, it's that ther eis no AI to speak of, just an engine interface that lets you issue commands.

It's the imagining systems that do the things you want the AI todo, and havign the basic C++ knowledge to udnerstand how they'll be written.


I would not reccomend usign codeblocks, especially since you have VS .net 2003, go get one of the existing AI's and load it up in VS, and look around.....
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Triaxx2
Posts: 422
Joined: 29 Aug 2004, 22:24

Post by Triaxx2 »

AF wrote:I never found making ym AI hard, I found minor problems hard but they where solved by other people.
Once you stopped paying attention to SY's interface at least. :wink:
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