[Freeciv-Dev] Re: AI strategy

[ccrayne@xxxxxxxxxx]

In <20011207012322.20300.qmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, on 12/06/01 
   at 05:23 PM, Raahul Kumar <raahul_da_man@xxxxxxxxx> said:

:Gui stub. You seem to be implying you have the infrastructure for a
:gui-less client side ai.

You infer correctly. My "aiclient" program is a text only version of
civclient in which the GUI interface has been replaced by goal driven AI
routines.

:That would be rather nice to see in CVS.

I am willing to contribute it, but be aware that it is currently based
upon 11.0 code.

:Details please.

I modified "packhand.c" to increase the types of server messages which are
passed to "gui-stub". In addition, I chose to restructure calls to
"gui-stub" as posts to a separate AI thread. I am still not sure if this
additional thread is necessary, but it works for me.

The decisions made by the AI code are transmitted to the server exactly as
the "back end" of the existing GUI modules transmit the results of a human
clicking on a menu item. For example, when my AI routines wish to build a
new city, they call "request_unit_build_city(punit_id);".

In terms of the AI itself, the infrastructure is robust, but the rest is
still very primative.

:I don't like the way you renamed ai to cai.

I should have said "copied and renamed". I understand the need to preserve
the existing server AI until client side AI becomes standard.

:You'll
:also need to make changes to the packets sent by the server. Currently
:the client side AI would lack needed info.

Not in my philosophy :-). My design goal is for the AI to operate solely
on the information available to a human player. So far, this has not been
a problem.

-- Chuck Crayne
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ccrayne@xxxxxxxxxx
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