I didn't see this in the commonly proposed ideas list or the first four pages of the suggestions thread, so here goes.

We've talked a lot about importing ships and sharing designs, but what about AI? I'm not talking about anything too far-fetched, just the ability to spawn and share AI with preset goals and morals. Why you'd do/want this? I don't know, be creative. It'd be kind of like sharing a mii or amiibo--nothing game breaking, just a little added challenge for the player like encountering an ace fighter pilot.

Maybe you'd set up several in a universe of finite size and see how they interact, like a Starcraft AI war. Maybe you want a rival faction. Maybe a bunch of idiot miners to raid at leisure. Use your imagination. I just thought I'd throw the idea out and see what people thought.

Afterthought: I'm almost certain someone's going to post a link to a long-running thread, because there is no way I thought of this first.

I actually like this idea, it's pretty cool.

I'm imagining just the ability to build your own AI (Through a text based file, is how I imagine it).

Black--Snow wrote:I actually like this idea, it's pretty cool.

I'm imagining just the ability to build your own AI (Through a text based file, is how I imagine it).

Glad to hear there are like minded folks. My original thought was something like the dev tools Josh used to view existing AI with a button that opens up the personality variables. Of course, that interface would need a save/import option.

What I wonder though, is how the game would respond to the sudden appearance of a new AI. Would it replace an existing one, what kind of assets would it spawn with?
Another thought: what if they were imported with the custom ships and you you had to beat them to get the custom ship print? I guess the real question is "How could such a mechanic could make or break the game?"

Basically the entire game is "made from text files" so sharing an AI should be no technical problem.

I doubt that this will be just a few numbers, though.
If you want to change the way an AI thinks you have to teach it new ways to act and to understand it's situation.

Jazehiah wrote:I guess the real question is "How could such a mechanic could make or break the game?"

Even without cheating there are ways to make an AI "good" by heavily leaning on things that a computer does well. Computing large amounts of data and accurate measurement in realtime.

Long ago I wrote a turret control / script / AI for Egosoft's X3.
While the ability to activate it for AI ships had been there nearly from the beginning, few players used it because they found it unfun to have their asses kicked by NPC capital ships. Not only did these occasionally hit what they were aiming at, they also were not easily distracted from the huge missile swarm that was intended to kill them, and they would constantly pester and unnerve the player by sending small drones to keep the pressure up.
Boarding (and stealing) ships became rather hard when said ships would actually shoot down your approaching boarding pods. Some players still managed. =)


A "good" AI - even if it does not cheat - is not necessarily a fun one.

Used JUST by the player to mow down the endlessly spawning mooks in that game it was definitely fun because when you spend hundreds of millions of credits to outfit your battleship, you expect it to kick ass, not be roadkill or barely limping home when it encounters a dozen fighters.

What do you mean by sharing "an" AI?

It's sort of like genetics. There are (to put it very loosely) genotypes, which describe how to build a particular living thing, and there are phenotypes, which are instances of actual individual living things.

So when you talk about sharing an AI, are you talking about sharing the code that controls how types of NPCs (as collections of traits) are created?

Or do you mean sharing the data that defines a particular individual NPC at some moment of its existence?

Or both? Or something different?

Flatfingers wrote: ... Or do you mean sharing the data that defines a particular individual NPC at some moment of its existence?

Something like that, yeah.

I don't want to rewrite the AI or how they function (though the X3 AI sounds like fun). I want to tweak their morality variables a bit, (lawfulness, greed, aggression etc.) give them some goals/projects, share that AI with another LT seed and see how it does.

The only 3 purposes of this sort of tweaking the AI personality are as I can see,

1) in-game social science.

2) creating hardened caste systems, aka slavery, which would in my opinion make the game less interesting unless you also included an anti-slaver and abolitionist goals. If you had this, it would be another axis of possible conflicts beyond resources, which would would be nice.

3) making everyone love MEEEEEEEEEEEE, and them having them fight to the death over who loves me more.

4) you want to seed a faction/empire/rival or two for the late game

I did say "use your imagination" when I first shared the general idea. It doesn't have to just be a snapshot of an AI. Quite frankly, I want to see a competition between custom-coded AI factions in LT like the ones for StarCraft.

That kind of reminds me of Screeps.

https://screeps.com/

Graf wrote:That kind of reminds me of Screeps.

https://screeps.com/

THIS. IS. AWESOME.

I clicked the link. I was not disappointed.

My day's productivity is gone.

I remember seeing a thread on here about those. That game might be a bit closer to the Command Line version of LT.
What I want to see someday is: eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition

Oh! I remember reading about those competitions on another thread. I always wanted to do something similar with one of the games in spring rts.

https://springrts.com/

Everything is in LUA, so I thought it would be fun to do a LUA AI scripting contest with my friends, but they weren't super interested, so I stopped pushing it.