RE: Xconq language thoughts

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery at indiegamedesign dot com>]

Stan Shebs wrote:
> >
> >Yes, writing AIs is hard.  However, most AI developers
> >probably have no
> >desire to write AIs in GDL, they probably want to use their
> >language of choice.
>
> Um, the AIs I'm talking about would be in C or C++.

Almost nobody is interested in writing AI in C.  Some will want to do
C++, "for the performance."  Others, like myself, find C++ to be a poor
fit to the AI tasks they want to implement.  People like that pick
Python or some other higher level language.

> In theory one could build
> infrastructure to link in other languages at that point; the
> API is the same as the
> networking layer, in fact the AI could be a separate program
> if one wanted.
> (Nobody has tried to write one of those either, despite all
> the years I put
> into rewriting the code so that it was possible.)

One question is how much coding is needed to get an AI going.  It's not
enough to have a separable layer.  It must be a *doable* layer.

> I don't actually buy that reasoning. Programmers who are really
> interested are
> willing to key in machine code using toggle switches if they have to;

Good luck attracting AI developers to your project then.  Have they been
beating down your door?  Actually, this would be a worthwhile question
for comp.ai.games.  "What would attract you to an open source project?"

One thing I do know about AI coders, from talking to a crowd of
Diplomacy AI writers.  Everyone argues over theoretical approaches, and
then people make up their minds about the best way to tackle a given AI
problem.  People always differ about what "the best" way is.  Once
people have drawn their lines in the sand, they will not do it your way.
Only their way.  At that point discussion has to cease and people have
to start implementing.

So, you might expect AI coders to be a non-cooperative sort of crowd.
The best thing you could do for them would be to provide tools for them
and get out of their way.

> I've been tricked before by the "build it and they will come"
> theory; see my remark above about the networking layer.

You don't want to "build it."  You do want an OO migration path that can
be implemented incrementally.

I'm going to look at how to poison your code base with Python.  I'm
giving it until Sunday.  If I can get Python embedded and make some
trivial game design or AI changes by then, I'll consider this viable.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.