[WF-Scripting] AI scripting

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, RaFaL Pocztarski wrote:

> Great. I've been observing the WorldForge for some time. I'm sure that
> very soon, the commercial games, like UO, will have no chances for
> cometition with WF. The WF will evolve constantly and when there will
> be couple of fully playable WF products, people would have no reason
> to spend money on other games, wich will of course have to be less
> complex and realistic.

Man, wouldn't that be great!!  Yes, that's exactly what we want to see
happen.  I think we've got half a chance, too.

> OK, I need some time to figure out how to install and run all of
> them. I use Debian but I can't use the .deb files because of many
> dependency problems.  Now I'm trying to make them up from the sources,
> I have some problems and I'm pretty busy now so it could take me some
> time.

*Nod*  Having this as the goal will give good purpose to the work.
I think you'll find it not *too* difficult to get this set up.  Good
luck!  Lotsa people can help so if you get stuck, ask around.

> > Once you've learned how to create the AI scripts, it would be *great* if
> > you could help us create some of the AI that we will need for Mason.

> I would love to. I've read everything about Mason and I think it will
> be a great game, when players start to build houses and whole
> cities. There should be many different profesions around building, so
> at the beginning the game would need many NPC's. How do you think,
> when approximately could it be playable for normal players?

Who can say at this point.  Acorn has taken approximately a year,
and while Mason is more sophisticated, we also have a headstart due to
having already done Acorn.  In the end it really depends on how many
people can contribute time to it.

> > 'Fraid the only good direction I can point you is to the Cyphesis source
> > code.
> 
> Well, it's not so simple to understand for me, at least now. I think it
> will
> take me some time.

Yup, but I think you'll enjoy it.  :-)  You don't need to look at all
the code - just the parts that involve the pigs and other critters, and
if I remember correctly this is all in its own subdir, so you won't be
overwhelmed by a lot of code (unless you want to!)  

> I could write some simple tutorial while starting to understand the
> idea. It wouldn't take me much time to just add few lines when I get
> something new.  But I don't know when I would start, I don't have much
> free time lately.  I think that the WF Project is very interresting
> and I'll try to use for it most of my free time. When I finally figure
> out how to install, run and use the software, learning the scripting
> itself should go fast, as I can see Python is pretty easy to read for
> beginners so I will learn from existing code.

Cool.  I think you have a good approach.  If you're limited in time,
focus first on the interesting bits, and the tutorial can come
secondarily if you have time.  

-- 
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Bryce Harrington     bryce @ neptune.net    bryceharrington @ yahoo.com