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Farm micromanagement

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 3:28 pm
by NoSpin
I find farming to be too much micromanagement. I noticed that when I team up with a AI the AI sets the farming as soon as any explorer sees new resources. This is cool.

A few ideas.....

Maybe create some generic AI that requires human assistance (ie they wont build new things, just farm, explore, or even set guard flags over any enemy base they find). And allow people to chose this AI to help without having to ask the game host.

or even better

Make a new tab that autofarms (but only if you activate it). You will have a list of farmable resources (farmable being anything that regrows) and next to your resource you get to select you farming technique (ie rows, checkered, or knights distance (like the Warrush AI farms trees)

or

Allow us to create little scripts that we can activate in a new tab. The scripts will allow us to customize our own.

Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 8:55 am
by Einarin
I like that idea, especially for newer players or when you're to busy managing defenses and/or upgrades to set up farming yourself. Manual farming is still important, because a human can set it up better than any AI.

I will look and see if I could write an AI to auto-farm, doesn't sound difficult, however I don't yet understand how Globulation 2 works well enough to integrate it or add the scripting tab...

Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 7:51 pm
by NoSpin
Another reason why i like it is when the workers find a new wheat source and i do not notice until they have almoste exhausted it. Now i must wait for it to regrow.

Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2006 11:05 pm
by Einarin
I just tested, and a good way to experiment with this is to team with a reach2infinity AI, it will perform farming micromanagement very well.

Try it and see what you think, because that AI has fairly good resource management other than overgrowth issues which they all seem to have problems with, and will interfere the least with other aspects of the game, especially as it lacks any war-making abilities.

Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:16 pm
by Genixpro
This is possible to do, if you know C++, with "Echo". I have some documentation regarding Echo. Echo is a sort of low-barrior API for making AI's. Keep in mind the documentation isn't up to date with the latest version in the cvs, but it is up to date for Alpha 21. Its very comprehensive, http://globulation2.org/wiki/Making_An_AI_With_Echo.

It should be no more than an hours work.

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 4:21 am
by Einarin
heh, probably not an hour for me because my C++ isn't very good yet, I only learned recently and haven't had the chance to use it much.

I will do my best over winter break (next week)

Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2006 12:35 am
by Donkyhotay
This sounds like a good idea, I was thinking it might be best to have an "auto-farm" toggle off to the side that players can use to activate/deactivate a special AI that farms for you when active.

Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2006 6:14 pm
by Donkyhotay
I was thinking about this though, if we did set up an AI to farm for people we will need to make certain it doesn't take away too much from the game. I mean people need to have SOMETHING to do while playing the game.

Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 4:56 am
by Einarin
So I thought I remembered C++ better than this :P I followed the instructions on the wiki, tried compiling, and hit a ton of gcc errors for things I was pretty sure were correct :shock:

Now school is happening again and I have no free time :( So basically someone with more coding experience should do it if we want it incorporated soon, I'll try but I'm not likely to have anything good before summer :cry:

Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:24 am
by Genixpro
Einarin wrote:So I thought I remembered C++ better than this :P I followed the instructions on the wiki, tried compiling, and hit a ton of gcc errors for things I was pretty sure were correct :shock:

Now school is happening again and I have no free time :( So basically someone with more coding experience should do it if we want it incorporated soon, I'll try but I'm not likely to have anything good before summer :cry:
What Wiki instructions did you follow? The ones for the Echo engine?

Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 7:24 pm
by Einarin
Yeah, but no worries, based on the errors gcc gave me I apparently don't remember the syntax of anything class related. I'll have to go back and remind myself how to do this, and just thought I'd post to let everyone know that if it gets left to me you'll be waiting a while.

Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 8:29 pm
by Donkyhotay
just like anything else open source, if someone really wants it someone will implement it.