{"id":1599,"date":"2008-04-10T11:56:15","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T16:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1599"},"modified":"2008-08-16T10:27:26","modified_gmt":"2008-08-16T15:27:26","slug":"user-made-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1599","title":{"rendered":"User-made AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

In yesterday’s post on Startcraft AI<\/a>, SolkaTruesilver mentioned here<\/a> that it would be nice to have a way to make custom AIs for the game and pit them against each other.<\/p>\n

This is something I’ve been pondering as well. It’s probably too much to hope that Blizzard will release the Starcraft source someday. That might be a terrible idea anyway, given the fact that the community is still going strong, not to mention the professional-level competition gameplay. Having the source would make certain kinds of cheating possible. You couldn’t get free money or anything like that, but you could<\/i> make it so that the interface shows you information which should be hidden from you. You’d be able to see (but not attack) fully cloaked units, start with the map explored, see what resources your foe has, and other information along those lines. Basically you couldn’t make a hacked client to let you do<\/strong> anything you couldn’t normally do, but you can make one that would let you know<\/strong> what you shouldn’t. <\/p>\n

So, Blizzard releasing the Starcraft source probably isn’t going to happen for us. <\/p>\n

Still, the idea of competitive AI programming is really compelling, and moreso if we’re talking about doing it with a game where humans can join in. Sure, you could write your own platform designed to let programs fight it out in some arbitrary manner (and there have been many systems like this in the past) but the whole thing doesn’t really get interesting until it has to face a human being. I think an interesting idea would be for a game designer to devise their own scripting language (probably some C++ flavored thing, but whatever) that allowed anyone to write AI modules and share them with others. Non-programmers could download new AI packs if they want a new challenge. Introduce some sort of global rankings system and we can see which AI packs fare best against the userbase and which ones people enjoy playing against. It would keep the game fresh and new, even for people who stick to the single-player experience. Actually, it would turn vanilla Human vs. AI play into a sort of proxy Human vs. Human. It would be some sort of new form of multiplayer, going against someone else’s AI.<\/p>\n

And now, let me construct my fantasy system and how I think it should work:<\/p>\n