From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 25455 invoked by alias); 20 Nov 2003 02:57:03 -0000 Mailing-List: contact xconq7-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: xconq7-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 25448 invoked from network); 20 Nov 2003 02:57:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out4.apple.com) (17.254.13.23) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 20 Nov 2003 02:57:02 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (a17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out4.apple.com (8.12.10/8.12.9) with ESMTP id hAK2v1nc026624 for ; Wed, 19 Nov 2003 18:57:01 -0800 (PST) Received: from scv1.apple.com (scv1.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.1) with ESMTP id ; Wed, 19 Nov 2003 18:56:27 -0800 Received: from apple.com ([17.112.76.143]) by scv1.apple.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id hAK2uTww025710; Wed, 19 Nov 2003 18:56:29 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <3FBC2D7D.70104@apple.com> Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 03:05:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Brandon J. Van Every" CC: xconq Subject: Re: Xconq language thoughts References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003/txt/msg00823.txt.bz2 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