Ok, let me start from the back:
: While were on the subject of external config files, Personalities of the AI is another thing that could be controlled in a similar way. There could be a bunch of preset personalities, and the user could easily specificy which one they wanted the AI to use, or even combinations of several personalities, or simply 'random' so that they didnt know what the AI was going to do.
Or, the ai could adjust its personality using past experience. But let's not spend to much time thinking about what the user could want to do with configuration files before we have an ai that could read them.
: Also, the preset personalities could even be Another thing that could be setup in an external config file, allowing the user to actually create their own AI personalities,
And how, if not in the form of parameters, would these personalities be expressed in the config file? Please tell me you are not suggesting to develop a scripting language for that purpose ...
: As far as benefits of things like barracks are concerned, this would have to be mainly preset, and slightly modified by things that the AI could figure out for itself, like current army size and number/frequency of enemy army units.
Yes. But why don't we do this for all buildings? A fixed constant supplied in a configuration file is not situation-aware. A computation within the ai can be. As for comparing libraries with market places: This depends on the relative value of tax income/luxury compared to science, which will be set in a situation aware manner. That will be included in the tentative design document I am working on.
Regards
Adrian
Posted 3-Nov-05 22:20 by Adrian