Spring RTS Engine

Radar AI
http://teake.home.fmf.nl/temp/RadarAI.zip

This group AI does something very basic, yet very usefull: it alerts the players whenever an enemy unit comes into radar / LOS.

Pros:
+ You don't have to keep a constant eye on the minimap for enemy intruders.
+ With any luck, you can get to the enemy intruders before they get to your mexxes :P
Cons:
- It currently broadcasts it message to everyone in the game.
- It gets a bit useless after the initial stages of the game when your base perimeter is better defined.
- It isn't compiled yet :(

The first con can also be a good thing: now the other players also now that you have recieved an alert, making it a bit more fair if your oppenent doesn't have or doesn't use the AI.

The last con is a big bummer: I can't compile it with MinGW so that it runs on the 0.71b1 release (which was probably compiled with Visual Studio, which I don't have). Would someone be so kind to compile it so that it runs on the latest release?

:update:
I've released a patch that updates the functionality of the Radar AI a great deal. Check my post below.

lol i would refuse to play with someone spamming me with messages

I'll take a look at the source and see if I can bring up a solution that doesnt require console messages.

Would you mind if I packaged this with XE8.1?

submarine wrote:lol i would refuse to play with someone spamming me with messages

It doesn't spam; it uses an interval of at least 320 frames between messages, and it reports groups of enemy units at once: e.g. "10 enemy units have entered radars/LOS".

AF wrote:I'll take a look at the source and see if I can bring up a solution that doesnt require console messages.
Would you mind if I packaged this with XE8.1?

You can perhaps draw lines on the map, but I don't think that would attract enough attention of the player. And sure, go ahead and include it (with name and reference) in XE8.1, but be a good sport and compile it first for me :P.

I'm thinking more fo a message that flashed by the users cursor, with a faint line in the direction of the event/s...

how about if it automatically pinged the units like human allies would do?

You've got your groupai's to draw before havent you AF?

pinged? huh? You mean draw a marker?

And yah, my groupAI's can draw photo realistic animation, albeit I havent worked on speeding ti up from a laggy crawl just yet.....

AF, stop stealing my topics.

Is nobody so kind to compile this groupAI with MSVC for me?

I'll ahve ti for you tomorrow

Great, thanks a million. Can you do an unmodified version (i.e. my original) and one you've adapted?

I can put it in the spring repository if you want? It seems like a nice non-intrusive AI dll...

ok but please make sure that only the player using the ai gets those messages. it might be annoying for the other players who dont use that ai...

It doesn't actually do that I think, there is no networking code and SendTextMsg doesn't send chat messages to other players.

jcnossen wrote:I can put it in the spring repository if you want? It seems like a nice non-intrusive AI dll...

Sure, go ahead! It's nice to know that my efforts haven't been in vain :). And in case you're right about SendTextMsg, you can remove the team number in the first part of the text message.

Can someone please compile this so that we can use it?

I play at 1600x1200 which means the dots on the minimap are incredibly hard to see. Not to mention when 1 dot blends in with the map.

I really need this groupAI

It's in SVN, so it will probably be in the next release too. IF you can't wait that long you'll have to poke AF for a compiled version (as he promised me some days ago ...)

I thought it was time to pimp up my Radar AI, and so I did. The patch is here:

http://teake.home.fmf.nl/temp/RadarAI_update.patch

This does the following:

• You can now press F3 which will take you to the location of the enemy unit that has tresspassed your LOS / radar.
• It also adds a notification on the minimap.
• I had to change the AI interface a bit to allow for the above functionality. I added the functions SetLastMsgPos and AddNotification, I hope jcnossen doesn't mind ...

Enjoy :)

yay that's very useful thx colorblind for those additions!


Now if onyl there was an explosion and weaponfired event

So is there a .dll we can download at some point?

It was added to the Spring installer. You should have it in your .../aidll folder.