Apr 07 2008
Trolls and dwarves, ambushing each other
On Friday, Mat came round and we played Thud. As a means of exploring the territory, honest.
I’d asked him and a bunch of others if they could solve a trig problem I was having1 which led to me explaining why I needed the answer, which led to Nick saying he’d like to get involved with this project too.
I’m writing a server-based game of Thud, so that Mat’s GUI client will have something to play against. Obviously big gobs of such a server is player AI for non-human players. Nick is the only one out of the three of us with genuine AI credentials, which will be helpful.
At the moment I’m throwing together simple heuristics as social potential fields and implementing them in the almost-bluntest way I can imagine. I haven’t got round to making a communication protocol yet, though it shouldn’t be difficult. The best step will be to look at how Mat’s client works, since the shorter the distance between the semantics of my protocol and his the better.
Naturally we’re going to have some hardcore language-advocacy arguments — my implementation is Haskell, Mat’s is C# and Nick wants to write in Java to play with a 3D framework he’s got his eye on. All in good spirits, of course. ;-)
If this comes to fruition in any way (I honestly don’t know how keen the other guys are, or how much free time they have for such things) it should be good fun. Solitary programming is enjoyable, but collectively working towards some goal provides an extra level of challenge and satisfaction.
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The problem and its solution is not worth going in to. I was just having one of those brainfart moments where I knew the answer was going to be mundane and painfully obvious, but I couldn’t see how. It just took a bit of conversation to tease the right answer out of me. ↩
Actually I was thinking of doing it directly in opengl… and I’m now leaning towards Objective C…