A Few Questions

General feedback and discussion of the game.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Hulavuta
Posts: 1668
Joined: October 11th, 2008, 8:17 pm
Location: United States

A Few Questions

Post by Hulavuta »

What exactly does RCA in the RCA AI stand for? And is it harder/weaker or what purpose does it serve?

Whatever happened to Wesbowl? Whatever happened to CampGen?

More questions to come as they appear in my mind,
F:tGJ, Saurian Campaign
The Southern Chains, a fanfic
“The difference between winners and champions is that champions are more consistent."
~Sierra
Pp2
Posts: 37
Joined: February 19th, 2010, 10:03 pm

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Pp2 »

I am unsure but I think rca stand for Release Candidate Ai

wesbowl, as included in the main game, seem to be gone for long now.

campgen is really lowly maintenned and is close to useless.
User avatar
Hulavuta
Posts: 1668
Joined: October 11th, 2008, 8:17 pm
Location: United States

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Hulavuta »

Is RCA supposed to differ from the normal AI? (Probably) in what ways? And I guess CampGen is kinda useless, since WML is relatively easy. But why did they get rid of Wesbowl? It was awesome..
F:tGJ, Saurian Campaign
The Southern Chains, a fanfic
“The difference between winners and champions is that champions are more consistent."
~Sierra
User avatar
Unnheulu
Posts: 738
Joined: November 25th, 2007, 4:50 pm
Location: Cymru
Contact:

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Unnheulu »

Campgen was ancient, and unmaintained. In all seriousness, it would probably be easier to write a whole new campaign editor than try and fix that one.

And no, that doesn't mean I will make a new editor :-P
User avatar
Hulavuta
Posts: 1668
Joined: October 11th, 2008, 8:17 pm
Location: United States

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Hulavuta »

xer wrote:Campgen was ancient, and unmaintained. In all seriousness, it would probably be easier to write a whole new campaign editor than try and fix that one.

I kinda doubt that
F:tGJ, Saurian Campaign
The Southern Chains, a fanfic
“The difference between winners and champions is that champions are more consistent."
~Sierra
User avatar
Unnheulu
Posts: 738
Joined: November 25th, 2007, 4:50 pm
Location: Cymru
Contact:

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Unnheulu »

It would. With the old one, you would have to go through and update all the old wml functions/add in new ones, and update the gui to reflect such features. Further more more functions would have to be added.

Also noone understands how the codebase works, now that silly walking yellow elaphant man allefant has left the project. Something like that takes time, and rewriting would be faster.

(Besides, gui's are fast to make, ntoice how fast I made that gui for shadowmaster? Took me (all in all, minus debugging) about a day/day and a half to make.)
User avatar
Gambit
Loose Screw
Posts: 3266
Joined: August 13th, 2008, 3:00 pm
Location: Dynamica
Contact:

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Gambit »

The answers in no particular order are

It died because it was stupid.
It was removed from mainline, but Bob the Mighty made a much better version called Wesball.
I've never heard that acronym. Are you sure you don't mean FAI?
User avatar
Hulavuta
Posts: 1668
Joined: October 11th, 2008, 8:17 pm
Location: United States

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Hulavuta »

Gambit wrote:The answers in no particular order are

It died because it was stupid.
It was removed from mainline, but Bob the Mighty made a much better version called Wesball.
I've never heard that acronym. Are you sure you don't mean FAI?
1)Kinda true, you needed to actually know some event WML to use it, which is kind of against the point of using an editor.

2)Is Wesball going to go on 1.8 soon?

3) When you play Multiplayer, you can have the AI set to "Default AI" or "RCA AI"
F:tGJ, Saurian Campaign
The Southern Chains, a fanfic
“The difference between winners and champions is that champions are more consistent."
~Sierra
User avatar
Gambit
Loose Screw
Posts: 3266
Joined: August 13th, 2008, 3:00 pm
Location: Dynamica
Contact:

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Gambit »

I just finished testing them against each other at the same settings.

The RCA AI seemed to know about time of day, and also seemed to know how to feed kills/exp to specific units. It wrecked. I bold "seemed" because I have no idea how it actually works. It could be the same AI in a different language for all I know. :P
User avatar
Hulavuta
Posts: 1668
Joined: October 11th, 2008, 8:17 pm
Location: United States

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Hulavuta »

Next Question: What happened to Great War? (I'm guessing Balance?)
F:tGJ, Saurian Campaign
The Southern Chains, a fanfic
“The difference between winners and champions is that champions are more consistent."
~Sierra
AI
Developer
Posts: 2396
Joined: January 31st, 2008, 8:38 pm

Re: A Few Questions

Post by AI »

Pp2 wrote:I am unsure but I think rca stand for Release Candidate Ai
Yes, the RCA in RCA AI stands for Release Candidate AI, because we like PNS Syndrome. ;)

It's Register Candidate Action or something close to that. To explain what that means, you'll need to understand how the old AI works. It performs certain phases (moving, attacking, getting villages, retreating, recruiting) in a specific order, so all attacks that are look viable are executed before retreat is even considered.
The RCA AI has 'candidate actions', which can do two things: evaluate, which returns a score for how good a move they can make, or BAD_SCORE if they don't think they can contribute anything useful, and execute, which executes one (or more) actions.
This would allow a "cover leader" CA to use a spearman to stop the leader from getting killed before the "attack" CA uses it to throw a javelin at a wose.

Currently though, the RCA AI is not much more than the default AI in a new framework. Actually using the RCA framework's capabilities is a task for 1.10.
User avatar
Hulavuta
Posts: 1668
Joined: October 11th, 2008, 8:17 pm
Location: United States

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Hulavuta »

Hulavuta wrote:Next Question: What happened to Great War? (I'm guessing Balance?)

So RCA AI isn't much different from Default AI? But it's planned to?
F:tGJ, Saurian Campaign
The Southern Chains, a fanfic
“The difference between winners and champions is that champions are more consistent."
~Sierra
User avatar
IPS
Posts: 1278
Joined: December 6th, 2009, 6:36 pm
Location: Venezuela

Re: A Few Questions

Post by IPS »

What are the great differences of the RCA AI and the default AI?

I had tested in 2 games a RCA AI vs a Default AI (both with loyalist in both games) and each AI winned a game (the first to move winned the 2 times) but RCA AI beated better the Default AI than the Default AI beated the RCA AI.

RCA AI like more smarter than Default AI. But... what is the difference? That is not obvious at all.
Creator of: Deathmatch new in 1.12 server.
Co-creator of: Era of Magic in 1.16 server
Developer of: Empires in 1.12 server, Ageless Era in 1.10 to 1.16 servers (but innactive recently)
Try My winning Orocia Guide
User avatar
jaimeastorga2000
Posts: 29
Joined: July 25th, 2009, 12:28 pm

Re: A Few Questions

Post by jaimeastorga2000 »

I think AI explained the difference between the AIs above.
Ferrous
Posts: 18
Joined: January 29th, 2009, 3:40 am

Re: A Few Questions

Post by Ferrous »

I played a game of 3v3 (me and 2 AI's vs. 3 AI's), where we each had a RCAI on each team. Map was Waterloo sunset.

My RCAI (undead) was in the middle, whereas the opponents' RCAI was in the upper left (Drakes). It seemed to me that each was the weakest link for each side. I'll see if I can post a replay and perhaps do a few more games. Two examples is hardly enough evidence of a change, but thought I'd mention it.
Post Reply