From: Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com>
To: "Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>
Cc: xconq <xconq7@sources.redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Xconq language thoughts
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 03:05:00 -0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <3FBC2D7D.70104@apple.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <OOEALCJCKEBJBIJHCNJDCEBAGMAB.vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>
Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>Stan Shebs
>
>>For instance, there has long been an ability to write
>>AIs customized
>>for a particular game design, but so far everybody has
>>preferred to just
>>sponge off the generic AI instead. (Not too surprising, since
>>AI writing
>>is hard, and there is no possible API that can help you with the hard
>>parts.)
>>
>
>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++. 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.)
>And, as far as difficulty of plugging AIs into an architecture
>goes, the Xconq C codebase looks (ahem) less than ideal. It is a
>sprawl. It may be a well-organized sprawl but it is still hundreds and
>hundreds of C functions. AI developers - indeed, any kind of
>developers - are probably more willing to do things in OO source code
>pools that take far less work.
>
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;
better API
and internals is for the benefit of the programmers already working on
the code.
I've been tricked before by the "build it and they will come" theory; see my
remark above about the networking layer.
Stan
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2003-11-20 2:57 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2003-11-20 2:16 Stan Shebs
2003-11-20 2:47 ` Brandon J. Van Every
2003-11-20 3:05 ` Stan Shebs [this message]
2003-11-20 9:47 ` Brandon J. Van Every
2003-11-20 10:52 ` Bruno Boettcher
2003-11-20 15:10 ` Peter Garrone
2003-11-20 11:15 Brandon J. Van Every
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