wraitii

French here, fairly fluent in English, my German isn't too bad and I've got basics in Russian.

You're going to say I do this a lot, but here's a penultimate update (the last for the day, rest assured ). I've started tackling the attack problem. It's still a very early development, but I implemented a class for dealing with inter army fighting (very-very basic for now), which should serve as a framework for further progress. I changed a few stuffs in the way Marilyn attacks: she will now do one or two early raids, and will retaliate if you attack her and she's still got a standing army. edit: see below for latest download. I did a few tests against qBot (on Oasis, though , but I think Marilyn is, if anything, more adaptable), and while she isn't way stronger, she's got the upper hand: -qBot craves for more food, but this might be civ-specific, and anyway Marilyn collected much more wood, stone and metal than qbot. -qBot built more units, but lost more too (again, I think this is civ specific) -qBot lost more buildings (including a town centre), and Marilyn regularly managed to send units in his base while qBot couldn't. Any remarks and testing will be appreciated

Getting access to at least the "high level pathfinder" for a set of entities would be nice... Sending armies could be dealt with more easily, analyzing the map can likely be done easier with the current AI API. (I'm thinking for example some sort of A* function that would return a path, possibly every x "cells" or at each turn.) I forgot about the UnitAI stuff. It would really be useful, particularly to know which unit is attacking who.

Actually, that could be a good idea... Getting sort of "defend the homeland" bonuses for the losing side. Usually, in RTS, when one side starts winning, it's over. With sort of "balancing parameters", it could be a bit harder to achieve and more interesting.

I'm not using the SVN version of 0 A.D., but marilyn ought to be compatible... It pretty much started as my take on qBot while I was on Holidays, and I've basically spent two months tweaking stuffs to make it about as good as qbot with a few underlying architectural changes. I'm doing this both for fun and to try to improve qbot while Quantumstate is not working on it... I've basically developed this my way, but it appears all the ideas I'm trying to implement are going in the way of what Quantumstate wrote above, namely the "attack managers", which I implemented on my own as attack plans (whilst not having read that he wanted to do so, too, funnily enough). Chokepoints I intend to do too. My biggest design change has been a few stuff in the Queues managers, the defense system (which I implemented separately for readability), attacks and the building of dropsites. I plan on making further changes, and perhaps someday change the economic aspect a bit. I'm also making Marilyn more suitable for the day technologies arrive.

If you're going for abstraction, you might go the full way: each fallen enemy soldier boosts a "slave bonus" counter, that decreases over time. Basically, the more you'd have of this bonus, the faster you'd gather resources. Easy, clean, no micromanagement. Note: this also would allow for different bonuses for different civs, ie those who did not have slaves for example could use this as a "prestige bonus" that would make their troops slightly faster or whatever. However, I'm thinking this might be too much of a "bonusing the winning side" thing.

Speaking of which: Here is a new version of Marilyn, again changing barely anything but streamlining. The attacks should now work properly (ie no units left behind, and the AI now can plan it's next attack while there's still one going on). I've also tweaked a few stuffs. edit: see below for latest version Basically, my TODO list is now "get the AI better at attacking/defending". Defense is still very very dumb. Edited the front post.

I think optimization, Water support, LOS support are bigger priorities. Of course, better entity/template support is always better. Edit: this will look dumb, but I just found out where the AI saved the screenshots it takes. Could prove useful.

Okay, so I got around to fixing the plan bug... So I'm working on the AI again. I'm not sure what I can improve exactly before 0.9, but I'll likely be able to add some stuffs.

Very interesting stuff on the pathfinding here.

Oh, that explains. A very good addition indeed.

Last time I checked the templates, these classes didn't exist. Then again, maybe I missed it. Which would make me feel -incredibly- dumb.

Okay, here is the fixed version. I made it so it will work with the release and the SVN version. I'm not sure if there's any real change... I know I tweaked a few stuffs about farming, but I'm having trouble with my attack plans for some reason. Download link

Not sure callbacks are actually needed for the AIs... There's updated often, and with a bit of tweaking, some "watcher" functions could be updated even more often. I quite agree with the other changes though.

Thing is... Some units lack proper "classes". For example, there is no way to know if a unit is a javelin or an archer. Which, given that now units will work with counters, is -extremely- annoying.

Allright. I'll likely release a newer version with the changes I did since last time... There are not too many but I'm sure I changed a few stuffs. I'm encountering a weird problem, in fact, with the attack plans... For some reason, it appears there are units that are "forgotten" each time a new plan restarts, and I can't seem to know why... Is there any way to check the metadata on a unit?

I can answer that: no, it does not, because qBot has no means of processing threats to determine what they are. It only detects enemy soldiers... This is actually one of the things I worked on in Marilyn, but I haven't gone out of my way to implement it yet.

I've been quite busy right now with school... And I've been searching for a good idea to improve the attack system once more, I'm not really satisfied by what I have know... And I've also improved the economic aspect of things slightly. The thing is, for newer change, I think I'll need to change a much bigger part of the code and I haven't got time yet to do that? Perhaps this week as I've got more free time.

To be perfectly in the "Mac OS X" spirit, you should likely put anything that's "~/.config/Oad" in "~/Documents/Oad/config" and likewise, cache and "local" would be in this "0ad" folder... Hiding stuffs in the root ~ folder is very un-OSX-y. Alternately, you could use "~/Library/Application Support/Oad", if you want to make it more "hidden".

To tell you what AOE III does: everything "static" is in the bundle. Data and dependencies. Everything else is in "~/Documents/Age of Empires III". This includes AI files, Savegames, scenarios, homecities. I think it's basically what you want for 0 A.D.

Okay, so to further develop your "open questions". The biggest downside of an app bundle can be weight. However, this is pretty much irrelevant for 0 A.D. since the libraries are basically lightweight. it's however much more convenient for the rest since it allows a user to simply put the app bundle where he wants and run it, nothing else needed, like most apps on OSX. As for where to put what, Data and things like that likely ought to be put in "AppPath/Contents/Resources". Libraries should be put in "AppPath/Contents/Frameworks". What you should actually put in "~/Library/Application Support/0AD" is more likely the hidden "config" folder that currently lies in "~". It should also not be hidden if put there.

This seems to be basically what's needed, from a fast-read... As for deployment, on Mac, the apps usually require only to download them and play... Things more complicated, like xCode, which needs dependencies and many many things usually install in a "package" that puts everything where needed. Linking to resource paths must be done on both the executable and the libraries. Given the variety of libraries used by O&d, I'm quite sure many are already in OSX, but I'm not sure exactly which, so we'll have to troubleshoot this. And yeah, dropping anything earlier than 10.5 is likely not a problem, mac OS release are usually well followed ( 10.6 was in particular since it was 20$ ).

Are we getting random seeds for random numbers in AI?

I'm likely going to work on my free time on an improved attacking system. But I wouldn't want to try and do something that Quantumstate is already doing...

There's no counter right now, it will be in alpha 9 afaik... So pretty much spamming spearmen should do the trick, I think they're the strongest. I'm gonna give this challenge a shot if I find time tonight... Not too likely however.