244 replies to this topic

[Mythos_Ruler]

You're supposed to kill the camel. lol

At any rate, I'd like to have an "Observer" option for multiplayer, so a person or two could watch a multiplayer match unfold. This would be great for learning and for tournaments.

[feneur]

Mythos_Ruler, on 22 December 2011 - 06:26 PM, said:

You're supposed to kill the camel. lol

I guess that's one way to do things =) (Though, doesn't the "loss music" play throughout the entire game then? Not that it matters much, but anyway =) )

[Mythos_Ruler]

feneur, on 22 December 2011 - 06:32 PM, said:

I guess that's one way to do things =) (Though, doesn't the "loss music" play throughout the entire game then? Not that it matters much, but anyway =) )

Right. I think we need proper "Observer" support.

[historic_bruno]

qBot's trying to gather from enemy farms (as in sending dozens of females into enemy territory, where they just stand around a farm). I guess it needs to distinguish between player owned, gaia, and enemy resources when building its resource map?

Edit: I can't always reproduce this, I guess it depends on the map and game state, but still I think it would be a good fix, there's really no cause for qBot to ever send so many females to an enemy farm, and least of all when it's well defended

[Mythos_Ruler]

qBot also sends tons of females into my base to gather from my chickens. lol

[hhyloc]

The same happened to me, too. qbot sent several female citizens in an early rush to my base, accompanied by some troops.

[quantumstate]

I have put a territory check into the resource finding code so this shouldn't happen again. Also fields are built more enthusiastically.

[JuliusColtranePille]

quantumstate, on 23 December 2011 - 10:17 AM, said:

I have put a territory check into the resource finding code so this shouldn't happen again. Also fields are built more enthusiastically.

just for my interest: how much time takes it to manage such a problem for you? seems you are pretty fast!

good stuff

[quantumstate]

JuliusColtranePille, on 23 December 2011 - 10:28 AM, said:

just for my interest: how much time takes it to manage such a problem for you? seems you are pretty fast!

good stuff

This depends a lot on the problem . For this problem it was very fast because not much code needed to be added and the problem was exactly known beforehand. I try and prioritize bugs in general because it encourages feedback and it is nice not to have lots of issues piling up. Here it was instant knowing the problem, less than 10 minutes writing code, then 5 minutes testing (by repeatedly deleting farms in the bots base so it had to go further afield for food) and then committing the code which was simple.

There are basically two sections to a problem. First is finding out what is going wrong, this currently involves thinking about what the code is doing and sticking lots of statements in which print things at various points so I can narrow down what is happening. e.g. Pureon found that on Hellanized Egypt qBot stopped producing anything after a while, the cause was that the maximum resource gather distance was too small so the fix was one number being changed. Finding the problem took maybe 45 minutes though since every test took a while to reach the point where qBot stopped working and I needed several attempts to narrow down the problem. In other cases such as siege not being used properly (still the case) the problem is obvious, since there is no siege specific attack code but implementing it requires careful thought and quite a lot of code so will take a good few hours probably.

[Pureon]

Thanks quantumstate, we appreciate the time you put into fixing our bugs

[quantumstate]

Pureon, on 23 December 2011 - 12:31 PM, said:

Thanks quantumstate, we appreciate the time you put into fixing our bugs

I think they are probably my bugs actually .

[feneur]

quantumstate, on 23 December 2011 - 04:00 PM, said:

I think they are probably my bugs actually .

It's good that you take ownership of them, but I'd say they are our shared burden at least in the sense that they are a part of the game we all work on

[quantumstate]

feneur, on 23 December 2011 - 09:05 PM, said:

It's good that you take ownership of them, but I'd say they are our shared burden at least in the sense that they are a part of the game we all work on

I was referring to the fact that I created them . I feel I should take responsibility for the errors I created.

[tribalbeat]

Haha, I just played against Qbot in Alpha 8 and it is so much smarter than Jubot! Still, it doesn't have any sort of way to communicate and work with allies. I feel it would add tons if the AI would "type" out things depending on what it is trying to do. For example, if the AI is attacking an enemy, it should say to it's allies that it will be attacking the enemy, or if it "wants" to trade with a teammate, it should tell them to build a market, but only if the teammate doesn't have one.

However, it is still a great improvement over Jubot, keep up the amazing work!

[ribez]

i've played a game in Median oasis map. At the beginning the ai is aggressive, but after some time it became inactive: i think that ai players finish their resources and don't know how to use the bartering system... when i have attacked their territories, i've found plenty of women doing nothing near the border of the map ready to be slaughtered.

I'm a very slow player (the game finished after 2 hours), so maybe the ai players are just tired

but overall the ai has made great improvements since the last alpha release

[infyquest]

I think in qBot, we also need to take care of below in ALPHA 9

• attack bonuses,
• the idle workers if resources are not there
• trade or barter
• handling allies

[quantumstate]

infyquest, on 18 December 2011 - 02:24 PM, said:

added a config.js file http://pastebin.com/vCrGg2t4
need to modify the rest of the code, check it out

I have put this into qBot now, I changed the style to the json style of object definition because I think it looks clearer. Working out how dynamic properties will be defined still needs to be decided.

[Pureon]

quantumstate, on 24 December 2011 - 06:33 PM, said:

I have put this into qBot now

That's great! Could it eventually also be the way difficulty is set?

[quantumstate]

Pureon, on 24 December 2011 - 06:57 PM, said:

That's great! Could it eventually also be the way difficulty is set?

Yes, there aren't enough options exposed to do that very well right now, but in the future it should be the way to adjust things like that. The config file should be powerful enough to produce specific AI play styles, so there could be booming/rushing/... types of AI all sharing the same base logic. Then this can be randomly picked or specified in the game setup.

[ac892006]

ribez, on 24 December 2011 - 09:32 AM, said:

i've played a game in Median oasis map. At the beginning the ai is aggressive, but after some time it became inactive: i think that ai players finish their resources and don't know how to use the bartering system... when i have attacked their territories, i've found plenty of women doing nothing near the border of the map ready to be slaughtered.

I'm a very slow player (the game finished after 2 hours), so maybe the ai players are just tired

but overall the ai has made great improvements since the last alpha release

I played Alpha 8 in oasis 2 alpha 8 for 50 minutes and the same issue propped up .

Qbot was great for the first 35 minutes but the moment I constricted Qbot's territory Qbot fell apart . It ran out of resources and stopped producing units that could defend its position . As a result 6 war elephants was all that it took to destroy Qbot . Apart from that Qbot is a large improvement over Jubot from alpha 7 .

Edited by ac892006, 25 December 2011 - 05:35 PM.