Re: [kingmt@home.com: [Fwd: Questions and Comments]]

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>  I have seen some of the emails about the "independent" vs "neutral" vs
>"mplayer" ai. Depending on how the mplayer code is set up it might be
>possible to make "ai personalities" to handle these situations. One nice
>side effect is the ability to make a range of ai players ranging from
>agressive to passive... Some of the denziens of comp.ai.games would be
>more than happy to give input.

There is support for personalities in two ways. First, you can configure
the independent side during startup (can Build, can Research etc). Right
now, these options work only in games such as ane.g which have "advanced"
units, but my intention is to make them work in other games, too. This kind
of configuration, which involves setting of gvars, could in principle be
extended also to the regular ai:s.

The second way to personalize the ai is, as you suggest, to clone it. Just
make a copy of mplayer.c and hack away. That is what I'm doing right to get
an ai for the independents which is less aggressive. There is already
built-in support for multiple ai:s, at least in the mac version. Just
compile in your own ai and it will be added to the little menu that lets
you choose between AI:none and AI:mplayer for your own side. Cloned ai:s
will of course be available to all sides, not just the indeps. Those who
think the mplayer is too tough may prefer to use the lobotomized version
also for regular ai sides.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se