Well, that has been a while, not? Not that we didn't do anything for NoAI, just nothing you would notice. So I thought it was about time I would let you guys know what we are up to.
As you might know we have been working on a Squirrel replacement. The first version kind of failed (not really knowing what you need to do, doesn't help in a first version), so a second version was started. Too bad Rubidium thought it would be a good time to start his thesis, so ... that is in a stand still to
But ... in the meantime I have been working hard in my local branch to change the internals of OpenTTD to handle the NoAI framework much nicer (read: without threads, without complicated code, ...). It kind of depends on NAIL being done, I thought for a long time, but after a good look at Squirrel, it turns out that I can commit most part of my local changes to NoAI.So, that is exactly what I am doing now. Slowly I am re-reading my changes and move them into the NoAI branch. Today I did most part to remove threads. Tomorrow I hope to remove threads. The days after that I slowly transform the NoAI code to a more readable form (codewise, that is). When that is done, we will need to stabilize that code a bit, so that most likely means I will put my attention back on NAIL. Nevertheless, even if NAIL never gets done, the new code should remove a lot of instabilities from the NoAI code. Also that should finally allow me to restart the tournament server (for who doesn't know, it is stopped because there are AIs who hit an infinite loop; not only annoying, it also makes it impossible to run the tournament server automated).
To summarize: a lot has been going on, just not in plain sight
(and also, Christmas is not the time to program ). Slowly we will move most things into plain sight, which should make NoAI stable. We are looking into merging NoAI into trunk, but don't expect this before 0.7. It needs a long time inside trunk to stabilize and allow people to write good AIs to be included in the main distribution. But more about that when that happens Any questions or suggestions, post them here! Have a good one!
