Spring RTS Engine

No the disease itself is caused by lazy AA players who never finish the AA buildtree and dont even send me what they've done so others can pick it up.

So.. how would I go about making said buildtree? I assume I need to make a folder in the TASping\AI\, with the same name as the .sdz file for AA2.11... and from there I would....?

AF wrote:As for AA buildtree, there is someone doing stuff with an AA buildtree but its not for sure atm.

I'm trying to get something that works, but I need to test it.

AF, can you explain some of the things you've done in commander.txt and the other buildtree stuff? If a commander comes to the B_BUILDER tag, does that queue a builder at a factory and have the commander assist building? If the AI builds 2 construction kbots, and armck.txt starts say, armmex, armmex, do they both build 2 mexes after being built?

B_BUILDER.txt is the abstract buildtree. If there are no mobile construction units in the commanders buildtree it's skipped, simple as.

As for your second question, yes you are correct, they'll build 2 mexes if possible.

OK, I just let 4 NTAIs play a FFA on Lava Highground. I copied over the AA 1.46 buildtree for now just to see what happened. There seems to be more wrong than simply the buildtrees:

The first scouts always go to the top left corner of the map. I think this used to happen a lot, and was a result of the AI trying to find a destination for the scouts, having nothing to work with, and so going for a default co-ordinate of 0,0 - the top left corner. Is there any way you could give the AI either start points or metal spots as initial scout targets?

Secondly, 3 of the 4 AIs built a lab before any powerplants or mexes. I thought I had changed this in the buildtree but checking it now, I did not. But, why did one of the AIs start with a mex instead? Does the AI not follow the buildtree exactly? I don't understand why it's building a lab first. Anyway, this is followed by building a scout at the lab while then building power, but the AI immediately hits E stall, and so takes a while to get going.

Thirdly, 2 of the AIs built a second Kbot lab after building the first, wasting resources. The buildtrees are the specific ones, naming the kbot labs to build (rather than B_FACTORY_CHEAP). The second lab came quite early on, about the point where the repair keyword is used in the buildtree. There are also orders to build T2 labs as well, so I'm going to experiment with them because I have a feeling the AI is going back to the start of the tree when it gets to repair or a building that the unit can't build. I'll fiddle with the cheap_multiplier as well.

Fourth, attack groups seem to constantly walk into each other. I watched groups of 5 Thuds of which only 2 or 3 could fire at a time because they were continually trying to move to the point in the middle of the group and getting in each other's way. Other AI attack groups would then somehow get units right into the first, so there were lots of point blank fights with a Hammer surrounded by Thuds. Not sure what's going on there.

Lastly, at one point one of the AIs built a sonar station in the lava. When it was completed, obviously it instantly blew up. Now, the sonar station doesn't appear in the buildtree, and again, there's no B_RADAR tag, so I don't understand this. Secondly, the AI needs to know whether to build naval units or not. In this case the presence of acid or lava makes it obvious, on some other maps it's not so obvious. At the same time it would be tedious to write a custom buildtree for every single map.

Oh, and there was no Dgun usage from the commanders. I don't know if that's by design or because they were E stalling though.

One thing that's bugging me though is how to get the AI to build a T2 lab at the right time. If I understand the buildtree correctly, if it gets to B_FACTORY_CHEAP and there isn't enough metal, the AI will build another T1 lab instead of saving the metal for a T2. On the other hand, specifying a T2 lab will make the AI build one when perhaps there isn't enough metal. Am I missing something?

Anyway, aside from these issues, NTAI still passed the most important test: I quit after 30 minutes, but I didn't get a single crash (and I haven't had a single one in XE9 at all so far).

Hmm, this post is a bit longer than I thought...

AA 1.46 buildtree is actually an XTA build tree that was written before Lindir started making XTA build trees.

B_FACTORY_CHEAP is now obsoleted by B_FACTORY, remember to add antistall=3;

Dgunnginw as removed as it was crashing NTai and lagging intensely so I have to rewrite it.

To that point I think ti better you help egaerwen with shi AA buildtree which is much more upto date and he's made much more progress.

If you wish i can forward a copy with a new NTai XE9RC21D to replace your XE9RC19.

And I squished the scouter bug last week.

Send me something to test, Im bored

My AA Buildtree status:

I hacked together a simple and very generic buildtree for AA just to try and get things working reasonably well. Unfortunately, I've been kind of busy with schoolwork and work-work lately, so I've not had time to really test it. (And I think I ran into a bug in NTAI, which AF has since fixed)

It's very generic, and I'd like to keep it that way, so it can benefit from any "situational selection" improvements AF makes and is easier to maintain.

If you want a copy to develop with, PM me and I'll send one your way. Note that you'll need a version of NTAI newer than July 11th, as I think that's when AF fixed the bug that was causing some very annoying behaviour.

I'm considering releasing an XE9RC22 soon anyways.

One new feature is a change to the way mexes are chosen so that it prefers cloakable and armed mexes in EE, aswell as a very basic ee buildtree.

AF wrote:One new feature is a change to the way mexes are chosen so that it prefers cloakable and armed mexes in EE, aswell as a very basic ee buildtree.

Any idea how this affects AA, if it does at all?

Not sure, although the enw system is score based, with scores being multiplied by 1.2 if they have weapons and 1.2 again if they can be cloaked.

Egarwaen wrote:

AF wrote:One new feature is a change to the way mexes are chosen so that it prefers cloakable and armed mexes in EE, aswell as a very basic ee buildtree.

Any idea how this affects AA, if it does at all?

AA has armed mexes, doesn't it? The AI will prefer them to the normal ones.

maybe not

for one it wont build the armed or cloaked variants if they cant be afforded.

Perhaps the installer can be improved a bit, so you can choose which parts you want to install.

pah

I'm looking into using NSIS

Some weird starts by NTAI:

He builds a lab straight away.!


He makes a unnessacary metalstorage and goes air after that!:



PS

I'm not trying to bash, i'm trying to help..

thats the default buildtree at work. The universal build routines have since been changed, and a basic AA buildtree now exists.

I have one or two changes to the rules section as suggested by lindir, and then some experimentation with NSIS now I find it does everything I want it to

NSIS

Which one are you using now? Spring uses NSIS, and I don't like it. It's scripting support is basically slightly better then batch files: Really sucky. There is InnoSetup, which has delphi scripting...

I havent quite gotten into experimenting with it but NSIS2