Spring RTS Engine

I posted before about some code projects that people were doing that allowed AI writers to have their code battle other peoples code. Now that I've been able to create a marginally workable I'm thinking it would be fun for the AI devs to be able setup a tournament and have it run automatically. The replays could be posted somewhere, and it could lead to some interesting action. The things required to do this will also benefit the general community, things like stats for unit creation, who won, game duration, map win loss stats.

Since the lobby server is java, and I know a bit of java, hacking it up to start the battles shouldn├óÔé¼Ôäót be much of a problem. The real tough stuff is the stats, but I think an AI could do stats if it could cheat. Another challenge is figuring out stalemates, detecting crashes but it sure would be fun to see who├óÔé¼Ôäós got the best AI under different circumstances like particular maps, air no-air battles, mod X vs mod Y.

Thoughts?

It would be interesting but only to see which AI si more robust after a while of letting us secrelty develop new features to decimate the other AI's.

We already sorta know which AI's are best at which maps and mods.

Sounds like robocode and the league that was set up, only this time, the AIs have a whole lot more to deal with. I'd say go for it, sounds like a really cool idea.

yes, robocode got me thinking about this idea, i was reading how ppl are doing their own rendering engine for robocode. I though why not use spring. Robocode is only in 2d, and has things that the AI currently access, but the idea still could apply to spring.

I dont want any versions of NTAI tested out in AI ffa's untill I make a new major release which could be a while.

I'm with AF on that. I want 1.07 to be the OTAI to play with.

Im not arsed, its looking like it will be ages till i release a new KAI version, especially with the more interesting secret stuff im working on atm!

krogothe wrote:Im not arsed, its looking like it will be ages till i release a new KAI version, especially with the more interesting secret stuff im working on atm!

i just wet my pants !
i blame u now u have to tell me ur secret cause u made me do so

Well im not saying a word, because im not sure its gonna be successful and well, because its secret :D
But yeah, feel free to pit the actual KAI version against other AIs in any map/mod, I dont really care and my balls wont shrink if it comes last, i promise
It would be really fun to watch the replays! me and choca had an AI fight the other day and KAI seemed to have a goal of foresting the whole map so it got owned hard, it was really funny!

Maybe a deadline should be set or something, otherwise people will just continue saying "No just wait until version x+1 is done!"

After all, AIs are unfinished (people know that), and results can change quickly so it isn't really negative publicity for an AI if it looses. Setting up such an AI war is exactly the way to overcome negative publicity, because an AI builder can prove that he has the best AI very fast...

Do one every week/month with the currently released versions, and then its even better, we can see how AIs improve in the rankings as time goes by instead of electing the "king" of AIs.
Wed need a scoring system too, and a way to spot which AI crashed the game if it does so, so it can be properly penalized.
The host computer would have to be pretty powerful too, i guess!
Although i doubt we will be able to have decent, stable tournaments anytime soon, we can start thinking out the rules, conditions, scoring and settings.
We want to test as many maps/mods/team sizes but i doubt anyone will have the sheer patience to spend unlimited time on it, so we gotta take that into account too!

In that case I dont mind releasing the 0.29b version once I unmuddled the buildtree just so you guys can playtest. So far in all playtests I've done with it as XTA core it's beaten every AI I'm aware of save KAI.

I've just released OTAI 1.07, so that's ready for some tourneying, too.

I've got a couple of demos on the link where it can be downloaded with KAI in there, too. Right here.