Spring RTS Engine

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.

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.

Thanks for the advice Tobi. I see you are part of the development team? Great job!

If you are using C++ I like devC++. You can get it at sourceforge.

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

!hard

timeconsuming

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.....

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.