Spring RTS Engine

Hello together,

it has been quite a while since my last post/sign of life and I assume most of the people from 10 years ago are no longer active as well. Over 10 years ago, I wrote the AAI bot ("A" for the lack of creativity as my first name is Alexander and "three letter AI" names were quite popular back then )

The main reason I stopped further development was a lack of time - during the last ten years, I did my PhD, became a professional SW developer, got married and started a family :)

As I advanced in my professional career I have little opportunity to use my coding skills anymore. Thus, I started to code in my private life again. After the first glance at the current AAI codebase I wanted to delete everything and restart from scratch. However, I decided to face the challenge and started to refactor AAI. I already fixed a few bugs (especially a crash in game) and can now play stable games with BA10.24.

So far, I worked on my own fork https://github.com/AlexanderSeizinger/AAI

My first goal is to finish the refactoring of some core components. After that I would raise a PR on the "official" AAI repo. Are there any active developers left? I noticed some forum posts from abma, would you be willing to merge my changes some time in the future?

Hi submarine, welcome back! S44 still going if you're interested in using it again.

Cool, that's great to hear that Spring44 is still being worked on. As a human player I really liked the unique game mechanics (though I was really bad...)

However, for an AI designed to play TA-like games S44 is very hard. My guess would be that it is easier to write an S44 specific AI from scratch. Is there any S44 AI? (I remember some very basic "build units and send them towards enemy HQ" AI)

Yes, and even harder now than back then.

There are a couple of AI's but effectively both are of the sort you describe.

submarine wrote: ↑20 Jun 2020, 13:55 My first goal is to finish the refactoring of some core components. After that I would raise a PR on the "official" AAI repo. Are there any active developers left? I noticed some forum posts from abma, would you be willing to merge my changes some time in the future?

yes, for sure! please don't get frightened, AAI was removed from the official spring repository some time ago because it was unmaintained, but that seems to be solved soon, so when you create the pull request, i'll try to readd it.

glad to hear that + good luck!

Awesomeness, excitedly looking forward to a testable/playable release :D

Why hello old friend, we meet again

abma wrote: ↑21 Jun 2020, 23:11
yes, for sure! please don't get frightened, AAI was removed from the official spring repository some time ago because it was unmaintained, but that seems to be solved soon, so when you create the pull request, i'll try to readd it.

Don't worry, as it was crashing as soon as the AI finished its first storage it was not really playable. I wonder why I never stumbled upon that when this bug was introduced.

My plan is to finish the initial refactoring of the internal Buildtree (as it is rather entangled with all other parts this is a major package) and fix/improve some minor things on the way and then raise the first PR. Afterwards it should be in a playable state again and it's time to look at all the other parts :)

From my current point of view, the old code is really horrible...

Just a short update:

After weeks of refactoring and > 100 commits I feel that things are moving in the right direction :) I fixed many smaller and a few more severe bugs in the process. I finished a major rework/refactoring of the Unit Selection/Buildtree (the criteria which are used to select units need to be reworked too to notice a visible improvement) and just started cleaning up the sector / map classes.

After that I can hopefully raise a big PR...

Even though I still have many ideas for improvements I think AAI is now in a state where it can be used again.

@Abma: is there anything I should consider before raising a PR? How is the AI version increased?

is there anything I should consider before raising a PR?

no, try and error i guess

How is the AI version increased?

AFAIK https://github.com/spring/AAI/blob/master/VERSION + https://github.com/spring/AAI/blob/mast ... fo.lua#L24

the first one is the installation directory name and the second file is, what will show up as version in spring.

Yeah!

The re-surfaced-Submarine!

Super nice to see many more 'old' people returning.
Awesome to see you're working on AAI again. For me personally it was the AI i played against the most.
Possibly over 400-500 hours.
Many thanks for that! (Which maybe also was a part in me returning back to Spring. - i couldn't find that fun in any other RTS ever since)

I can sometimes be blunt.. so i'll just get it out: Did you see/hear/played the new BAR already?
And would it perhaps be possible to get AAI in BAR as well?
Would be awesome!

Info and links etc are on: https://www.beyondallreason.info/

PS. I've fully switched to Discord, so i might not respond here quickly, but i'll try!

Thanks for the nice words

I test AAI with BA10.24. I figured out that detection of Metal Makers is currently broken; apart from that it runs very well (i.e. stable).

Is BAR very much different to BA or is it just visual/balance changes?

Can you build AIs yourself? You could check out my fork (link in the first post) and give it a try.

The differences between BAR and BA 10.24 (other than visuals) isnt all that much, look at the changelog between the 2 versions here:
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Be ... ngelog.txt

@Abma: I finally created a (huge) PR :) Next time, I will not wait that long.

@IceXuick: I checked the page but have not found time to try BAR yet. From what I have seen AAI should work with BAR, too. A proper config file (I assume BAR no longer uses the internal unit names from TA/BA) would be required though.

BTW: Your maps are really, really beautiful! I am really looking forward to getting water maps working properly again and doing the playtests on boulder beach :D

Most of the unitnames are still the same for BAR and BA, a handful of exceptions exist.

Thank your very much for merging, abma!

What is your preference in the future? Regular smaller PRs every few commits?
(in my professional life as as SW development consultant my hair would stand on end if someone raised such huge PRs :D )

submarine wrote: ↑27 Oct 2020, 19:28 What is your preference in the future? Regular smaller PRs every few commits?
(in my professional life as as SW development consultant my hair would stand on end if someone raises such huge PRs :D )

as AI's are git submodules it doesn't matter if the changes are small or huge... basicly only you could review the changes. i can only do some basic tests and give feedback or review it when you request it: but thats difficult for large changes.

the changes/commits how you did look well, so its difficult for me to give proper feedback. the ci starts to work, when it compiles (which it doesn't atm with gcc 10.2 at least)

did you notice that your changes don't compile https://github.com/spring/AAI/pull/1#is ... -717416617 ?

where should i report errors? do you plan to do more changes? if so, IMHO it maybe makes sense to give to push commits to the spring/AAI, as still the submodule in the spring engine repo needs to be updated, too.

Sorry I have been away for a few days. I already raised a PR that hopefully fixes the issue.

Thanks again for asking!