2 AI Questions

[Loren]

Originally Posted by Arralen

There's no way any kind of "external" AI (help) can be implemented
.. simply because turn files/generation is closely interwoven with the copy protection scheme and cheat protection. It is simply not possible to read & write turn files with an external application (otherwise one could write an "automated player" which would appear to the server as a regular human player).

And this would be so bad how?? It's not like it's a game where the AI can outperform a human!

Likewise, in-memory manipulation of the server, to alter the between-turn AI routines, wouldn't work either.
Best bet would be some kind of "API" that lets your dom3.exe itself dump the info, and read a turn script to make a turn file from it. But that would be a major code addition, and therefore will never happen - even small GUI changes won't be made, and that project would be several magnitudes bigger ...

While it's not trivial it would not need to be at all hard to implement. All that needs to be added is the name of the file to be called to process the turn--a separate setting for each race so you can have multiple AIs in the game.

We already have virtually everything we need to do this--the needed files are already being exported and it can already read an import file with the orders in it.

I would *NOT* expect them to write an AI for it.

The only issue I see is how to do this without leaving a hole in the copy protection.