Just to echo what was said earlier - the idea of client side agents is fundamentally a bad one because it requires too much information to be kept and sent to the clients. Only on the server can you access the amount of game state required for such agents without running head first into race conditions and then deadlocks when try to fix that because data has to be distributed over the network link and goes out of sync. It took CMA a very long time and a lot of work to reach its present state of stability. And CMA "only" does city tile management.
I have also changed my mind about the desirability of a computational game AI. The amounts of CPU time required to compute best outcomes increases in such a dramatic fashion when the game rules are generalized, that it is simply not worth it. Good rules of thumb that can be written as AI scripts specifically for each ruleset will be faster, easier to write and maintain, and (therefore) probably even lead to better outcomes. This was not an easy conclusion for me to reach, because I spent a lot of time on the current computational AI. Hindsight is nice. If you want to throw computations at Freeciv AI problems, I recommend writing a program that analyses a ruleset then generating script rules that can be used later for a game AI. That way you can use as many CPU cycles as you want without anyone complaining. - Per _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
