Has anyone considered the possibility for PA to also have player competition where instead of personally controlling your units, you write an AI which plays the game? For example, the Starcraft AI competition where participants submit their own artificial intelligence to play a huge number of games against other submitted AI's. Programming games are a dying breed. Games like Grobots are becoming exceedingly low-budget and rare. I for one find such games very interesting, and quite different from playing the game myself. And because an RTS title needs to have an AI anyway it seems like allowing and encouraging player-made AI's is a relatively easy feature to implement. It also fits wonderfully with the PA lore that these are autonomous Von Neumann robots. Essentially the only technical requirement is to have an AI file that can be replaced with a player-written AI file. Players would also need some documentation. In order to write an AI the budding AI programmer needs to know what they can do within PA, including whatever functions and hooks are available to use for writing the AI. We would also need to allow players to run games just between AI's. It would also be helpful to be able to run these headless at high game speed, but not necessary.
It certainly would be interesting. However, I wonder if it will be possible. Per Sorian's GDC presentation on SupCom, the AI system there was based on training a neural network and it seems likely that something similar would be used for PA. I don't have any real expertise in the field but I would think that there simply is very little or no code per se to be tweaked and even the majority of professional (non-game) programmers would not have the right knowledge to re-train the neural network. While I'm on the topic, it also makes me wonder if the AI will be able use custom units from mods effectively.
I would greatly like a feature such as this. I would actually enjoy watching a replay of a game between two AI over that of two people. I would probably follow an entire tournament of AI.
Knowing Sorian, I'm sure there will still be a large number of options in terms of tweaking the AI, after all that kind of stuff is where you get the different difficulty levels you know? Also Worth remembering is that Sorian didn't create the SupCom2 AI, he did work on it at time, but he wasn't the driving force behind it in the beginning(If I recall correctly) Also I think we've talked to Sorian regarding Mod Units as well, given that he wrote the code to do it in SupCom1/FA I'm confident he'll do everything he can and then some. Mike
You're not going to see many people in those contests. The people who CAN handle such contests are already qualified to make a good deal of money in the field.
Actually, there are quite a few people in the AI world that enjoy competing in contests like that. Myself included, when I have the time.
Sorian's Forged Alliance AI is incredible. I would imagine if there was 3 more Sorians out there and each of them built their own AI then I would definitely watch that 2v2. Playing with AI like this is not advisable though, the robots will take over one day...
It's also good to remember that Sorian started as a modder too... all it takes is an interest and a platform and a whole lotta hard work...
Not to downplay the importance of the good mans work, but it's not that amazing. The default AI is pretty good. It was a huge improvement on the vanilla AI but obviously GPG took the hint. So it's a rather minor improvement in FA. And from my own experience, Duncane's fix kicks its ***.
I think the idea is pretty cool for the small niche of people that it applies to, but are we trying to *encourage* the birth of Skynet here?
What Language are you guys using to program the AI for PA as you using a Functional language like CLISP or something else?
