Red Brick Games

I’m glad I’m finally working on OVM’s Artificial Intelligence. The A.I. is one of the chief reasons I wanted to write an RTS in the first place. But it’s taken me two years to get to this point! How frustrating.

Game development sometimes seems like an exercise in extreme delayed gratification. Work for a zillion years, to finally get to the part you really were interested in. Though I suppose the same can be said for software development in general. Writing code just takes a long time.

My “comprehensive” task list for OVM now has 99 remaining tasks. I seem to average about one task per working day, or just slightly better, so that gives some indication about where OVM stands schedule-wise. “Comprehensive” is in quotes of course, because new tasks still get added occasionally, but the list’s growth has slowed to about 1-2 new entries per week.

More screenshots. Several of these show the new chase camera perspective.

Click any image for its full-size version.

(btw - happy Martin Luther King day!)

I’m finally doing some A.I. work in Orcs vs. Martians.

Currently, OVM’s A.I. has an annoying cheat, one that StarCraft also had and was infamous for. The cheat is that A.I. players can see the whole map. Fog of war doesn’t affect them - they know where the resources are, they know the terrain, and most annoyingly, they know where all your bases are.

In contrast, you, the human player, have to explore thoroughly in order to know anything.

A lot of OVM testers have said that OVM games are “too fast”, and this is one reason why. As soon as an A.I. player has military units, he can send them straight to your base.

Nowadays, I’m not sure how prevalent this cheat is in RTSs. I remember seeing an interview with the developers of Age of Empires II, who were kind of proud that AOE2’s A.I. didn’t have this cheat (it had to explore just like a human player).

- - - - -

Personally, I really dislike the cheat. Rules-wise and fairness-wise, I like being on completely even ground with A.I. players. I prefer to compete with them based soley on their A.I. algorithms. It’s ok for them to have handicaps, but those should be things that get specified in the game setup.

The key to removing the cheat is that each A.I. player needs to remember his own “view of the world”. Then, he needs to reason based soley on that view of the world, and not on the actual world.

His personal view starts out very incomplete, since most of the world is covered by fog of war. It also continually becomes stale, as information gets old and out-of-date.

Which leads to some interesting scenarios.

• for one, the A.I. may build up an attack force, ready to attack another player — but then may not know where any other players are to attack!
• the A.I. may also send an attack force against an enemy base that he remembers — only to discover the base is no longer there! E.g. if it got destroyed in the interim by a 3rd player

It should produce pretty interesting behavior, as the A.I. would occasionally squander opportunities and make mistakes, due to having imperfect information. Much like a human player!

Getting this to work in Orcs vs. Martians is going to require a good exploration algorithm. If the A.I. can’t see the map, his units need to be able to explore the map. And once he’s explored it, his units need periodically to re-explore it, because of the staleness issue. So the algorithm needs to handle both initial exploration, and re-exploration.

I think the exploration algorithm is going to be pretty key to getting this all to work.

Found & fixed a bug (of mine) that was occasionally duplicating OpenGL textures. OVM’s memory consumption now barely goes above 500 MB. : )

Good news on the memory front - I’ve got Orcs vs. Martians‘ memory consumption down to about 714MB, in the worst case. That compares to my earlier figure of 1,100 MB.

That’s still too much - I’d like to see memory consumption well under 512 MB.

Technicals

Here’s something strange. When I hit that worst case, Torque actually tells me that Torque + my game logic are consuming only about 40 MB of memory.

Uh. Ok.

Let’s see, 714 minus 40 is 674. So, if Torque is only consuming 40 MB, who is consuming the other 674 MB?

The OpenGL drivers …?

(no game development info in this post — hey, it’s my blog, I can write about what I want! it’s your own fault you read it :-/ )

At the risk of sounding smarmy, I had a positive experience I wanted to post about. I just did jury duty down at the local municipal courthouse, my 2nd time down there for that, but the 1st time I was selected as a juror.

I was really impressed with the judge and court personnel. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an environment of respect, professionalism, fairness, politeness, and friendliness. Wow. With all the negative, acrimonious complaints we hear from various quarters about “the system”, I think it’s important to recognize when things are going right. Going into court, I guess I was expecting something “less”; and instead, I ended up being pleasantly impressed.

The judge was just about as friendly and helpful as a person could be. The defendant was just an average joe, representing himself without a lawyer. Since he wasn’t a lawyer, the defendant made some procedural mistakes and got out of order a couple of times. But the judge politely coached him through the court process - something I’m sure the judge didn’t have to do. The judge carefully toed the line on all the rules, explained everything clearly, and maintained strict impartiality.

Even the bailiff, the guy who enforces order in the court, was a friendly and talkative guy. While we were in recess, he told us jurors about some of the interesting case traffic he saw coming through the courts while working there.

The jury itself was also interesting, since it’s a random selection of goofballs like me. I was curious what it’d be like. But we all got along well during deliberation, and everybody seemed to respect each other’s opinions at the table. (that, of course, doesn’t necessarily reflect on the court system, but I’m glad it worked out that way : ) There was one juror who I thought had a prejudice against the plaintiff, but that was the only fly in the ointment.

It was an encouraging thing to see and experience. Let’s hear it for the system when it works! And “yay” for public servants who show excellence in their jobs.

If I’m ever a defendant or plaintiff myself, I’d feel extremely comfortable sitting in that court with that particular judge.

Good job, Austin Municipal Court!