AI Configurability

[yoyo1505]

I was just wondering what levels of configurability there are planned to be for the AI by the time 0.7 is released. It seems to me that the intelligence factor may now be made redundant (but maybe not - I don't understand how the coding works so I could be wrong on this one).

Could it be possible to add in new levels of configurability, like aggresiveness or preference for a transport type? Just a suggestion, but I don't know if anyone has given this much thought.

Cheers

[Zutty]

I don't know whether or not AI developers have access to this data of not yet, but if so I was thinking of using this to determine how aggressive my AI should be.

It could use "Hard" (or whatever the highest setting is) for aggressive, tournament winning (I wish! ) performance, but on "Easy" it would just lie back and build pretty road layouts, earning only enough money to stay in business.

Either way the pathfinding and general strategy would be the same, it would just scale the amount of profit it tries to make up and down.

[Zuu]

I'd say either we have fixed configuration options that OpenTTD provides such as it is today with the old AI. Then it is up to the AI-writers to obey them or not. (some could be enforced through)

Or we leave it up to AI writers to via the API register configuration options that then would differ from AI to AI.


In the first case there could be a way for AIs to via the API tell OpenTTD that they don't obey a specific setting so users are aware of it, but the drawback of the first method is that AI-creators are bound to the settings provided by OpenTTD. Before NoAI hit trunk I believe it's still quite easy to influence what will end up as settings, but perhaps not later when NoAI become stable. Via the second way where AI-creators decide the settings they also get a tool that could be useful for debuging.

[Yexo]

AFAIK, each AI will be able to provide some custom settings (a description plus a min / max value) that can be set by the user. The user can for every AI he/she loads set these parameters. A few general settings will remain (building speed for example) which can not be influence by the AI. The main problem at the moment is that nobody like to code the gui for this. If anyone wants to do so, please do and don't hesitate to join #openttd.noai to ask some help.

[athanasios]

Even if the layer cannot have a GUI to configure the AI, it would be great to have a "random" AI.
It simply gets boring watching the AIs play exactly the same way.

[TrueBrain]

The last 2 commits answers the initial posters question I think. It boils down to:

via info.nut you can tell which settings an user is allowed to set, and you can read the value via GetSetting() in your AI. The default value for a setting is set by the difficulty level. Cool, ain't it? A GUI for it is coming up soon .. we hope

[athanasios]

Good news. You made us happy.

[TrueBrain]

Good news. You made us happy.

My intention in life: to make you guys happy