wraitii

The 100% health method has been committed as of [13263]

Should Aegis be made the default AI? (asking both team members and other people. Keep in mind that I can plan to add some sort of difficulty system before Alpha 13)

I like the frozen-time approach. It'd have to be done correctly tough. Perhaps similarly to B&W 1: the camera is in outer space, aims for Earth, and as you finally come down enough to see the units, frozen time with some animation to show it and a little music to go with that... And then Unfreeze as the camera gets hit by a catapult rock and crashes to the ground, only to see two units fight it out, and the the 0 AD logo comes in. Just an idea. Definitely not high priority for now but a good cinematic intro can go a long way to make the game memorable. I know I'll remember AOE1's intro forever.

Okay, light update to fix a few issues that popped up. Fabio, readme.txt has been updated (Never knew about that file ). Yves, this should fix the two bugs you reported above. 1 definitely is (it was actually faulty logic when the AI reached max pop), 2 should be mostly. I've slightly changed building placement, might help the pathfinder. (also reverted accidentally committing a profanity into svn. Sorry bout' that.)

Fabio: basically it's faster to code than some more advanced logic, but I agree. Generally it should be tied with number of workers, not time. Will do about the read-me

Yeah, I know about 1. I've made the AI place buildings a little less far apart again, so this kind of happen. Normally attack plans should detect they are stuck and disband after a while (can be 3 minutes). But I should probably just place houses closer together. Thanks for reporting 2 though, I had forgotten about that one.

Changes committed to svn. Also added the support for "-autostart-civ" to set the civilization at start. Requires recompiling. So basically the defense manager should react much better. Garrisoning should mostly happen when it makes sense, and the units should not attack you just because you stepped in their territory. Furthermore I did tons of change to the attack manager to make it actually able to attack. Note that the AI absolutely sucks with ballistas. Any civ that has rams will work much better (that's basically all of them but Athen, I think). The AI should be able to actually destroy its opponent if it takes the upper hand (seen it done in 30 minutes. Usually done by 40 minutes against qBot. Even if it has 5 fortresses to tear down). The problem of idle units doing nothing is also gone. Aegis is still no rusher (earliest attack will be around 13/14 minutes) but it will generally attack every 3/4 minutes after, with increasingly sized waves if you don't kill it (after 25/30 minutes, they get seriously dangerous). It seems to get stuck sometimes when attacked, will look into it. (also, did a benchmark with a slightly different config.js: Aegis reaches 300 units in 21 minutes.)

Yves: tried to reproduce the error, couldn't on that map because there were other errors that I fixed. It does happen to me in some cases, but it doesn't seem too reproducible or annoying. If you find a scenario where this happens again, do tell (or a RM with a seed). I've been fixing tons of stuffs, and I think you'll find Aegis is much more efficient. Here's a little screeny of a 1v1 Aegis/Aegis (Sparta v Rome) which Aegis won (by destroying everything that Sparta had) at exactly the 40th minute. The big screenshot is at around 33 minutes, showing the maximal development of both players (that attack by Rome actually failed, but weighted too heavily on Sparta which was lagging behind since the beginning.)

Note that there is already such a sound in the data, in audio/interface/alarm.

Might also use updated libraries and things like that make it run faster and better on modern hardware, though.

Thanks for reporting, Yves. Just committed an update, issues 1 and 8 are definitely fixed, 2/3/4/5 might be to some extent, 6: unsure, but could be related to 1.

Seems like it'd start getting really complicated to balance if we go down that road.

I must say, exponential armor seems both cleaner and more elegant to me too.

Thanks for the report, Enrique... I'm getting a weird bug on occasion where the AI will crowd the map with useless dropsites which I'll have to fix. And there seems to be a few defense issue. Also, ballistas are pretty useless, though ram get used correctly. Will work on that.

(just for fun, a little comparison between "now" and "then"). A screenshot I had posted in early august, back when I had just started work on what would become Aegis, of a victory against qBot on the RM Continent (I was blue, did nothing on purpose. qBot was red, Aegis green. Can't see the timer but it was at 41 minutes). Screenshot of the same thing happening now (aegis blue, qBot red). (You'll also notice Aegis sucked at attacking. It had won by 25:00).

Sure of that? The warnings themselves are normal, "debug" is still on this the default config file (can change that in config.js, in the qbot-wc folder)

-___- That's me being stupid when committing this morning and accidentally reverting a line. Sorry bout that, just change "if (callconstructor)" to "if (hasTechs)" in the meantime. Will fix in 1 or 2 hours. Edit: ah nevermind, I'll actually do it right now... Edit2: and done. Pureon: exactly my opinion, but I don't think it deserves a "Initializing AI" screen unless we actually did this for the whole process.

Fixed as of now.

Do report it here, it's as good as any other place (also, please post your map settings)

Allright, everyone, so this has finally been committed to SVN, and will show up in Alpha 13. A short list of new features (the AI referring to Aegis): -Speed ups in many parts of the AI, in particular having many Aegis Bots should be noticeably faster (though not yet fast) -Improvements in many parts of the AI. Defense should be slightly better, dropsite placement has been noticeably improved. Aegis should be able to be more efficient. Many many bug fixed. -Support for technologies. Aegis itself goes up in phases, and will research technologies (though it chooses which randomly) -Early support for naval maps. On some maps, the AI will build a dock and try an amphibious attack (very experimental still). -Early difficulty support. You can choose from one in three settings (note: this may get a GUI side before Alpha 13). More technically: You may experience a little lag when the map generation reaches 100%: that's from the AIs initializing. It should not feel too long. I can't recall if there was still some, but that should seriously help with the weird "initial lag" that sometimes happened right at the start of a game. Expect Aegis on the hardest difficulty to be noticeably sharper in the first 15 minutes if you leave it alone.

Caused by some changes I did to the AI system yesterday. Will be fixed anytime. Thanks for reporting!

I think he means some sort of adaptative AI that would learn from the player/games and slowly improve. They're quite in fashion right now, I'm not sure how efficient they could get though, but it'll be very interesting to see anyway .

And of course the Wilhelm now and then. (note: not actually advocating it)

You need to look in source/simulation/components, for the AIManager (and the corresponding AI interface stuff in both c++ and js). Basically, what you want to do would require changing the AI Manager substantially. Right now it calls a JS script, and gets info about the simulation from another JS script. You will want to change that script to give you any information you need, and you will want to change the AI manager to work in C++ (that is actually mostly trivial once you have parsed in C++ the javascript simulation state.) Most of what you described is already possible. However, the code might need a little time to get used too.

Gave it a go in release mode. Seems to work pretty nicely, doesn't slow it down toooo much (basically a .5 second lag quite regularly. Seems AI tied but can't be too sure)