A PGD Challenge without Scoring and Judges?

[phibermon]

the AI you are referring to is comprised of many systems operating together, you have various path finding and steering algorithms for creating 'intelligent' movement from place to place in the environment, this usually operates as a service to higher level code such as state machines, priority lists, scripts etc

Interaction between entities happens at different levels, to calculate the path for the player to take to walk around an enemy, avoiding intersection of geometry is a lower level from game like interaction such as instructing an enemy to attack the player.

Also you'd use/have different approaches/restrictions depending on how many AI entities you plan on processing and the kind of environment that they inhabit.

IE a dynamic destructible environment requires more work for AI to manage than a static environment. Some situations allow you to cache paths across maps, others not so much.

At the highest level it's all game specific, imagine skyrim and enemy AI casting appropriate spells for the situation etc

[pstudio]

Can you please remember the name of that game. I have been searching many times to find any such game which would use Pascal language for AI development and I had no luck finding any.

Sorry, I can't remember the name. Thinking back I Think the game used Delphi Web Script. It was a 3D game where you hd to write the AI for a fighting robot.

If you ask me I think it would be best to use Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs). From what I know all of Pascal Development tools are capable of compiling Dynamic Link Librarry.
But for this to work the game itself should alow the DLL to retrieve needed information so that decisions can be processed and then returned back using some standardiesd procedure. And if you allow theese DLLs to actually be able to store some presistant data you can even write yourself procedures whoch would alow you to actually compile yourself a map so that you can coordinate your units better.

I'm not sure Oxygene can be compiled into linkable libraries. You would also have to make sure that there's no licitation on OS.

the AI you are referring to is comprised of many systems operating together, you have various path finding and steering algorithms for creating 'intelligent' movement from place to place in the environment, this usually operates as a service to higher level code such as state machines, priority lists, scripts etc

Interaction between entities happens at different levels, to calculate the path for the player to take to walk around an enemy, avoiding intersection of geometry is a lower level from game like interaction such as instructing an enemy to attack the player.

Also you'd use/have different approaches/restrictions depending on how many AI entities you plan on processing and the kind of environment that they inhabit.

IE a dynamic destructible environment requires more work for AI to manage than a static environment. Some situations allow you to cache paths across maps, others not so much.

At the highest level it's all game specific, imagine skyrim and enemy AI casting appropriate spells for the situation etc

If it is a game like the Ant game then yes; it is built of multiple sub systems. However the game could be anything. If it is a simple board game the fode needed to make a working AI will also be simple. I define a working AI as a program that can make a valid move each turn. It may not be a smart move but at least the game can continue running.
I will however point out that it will of course not be easy to write a really good AI. It is an AI challenge afterall.

You make some valid points that need to be considered if we were to hold an AI challenge. But do you have an overall point I'm missing? It's not clear to me if you think the AI challenge is a bad suggestion or if you're simple pointing out things that must be considered.

Anyway, the AI idea was just a suggestion. A more traditional game making contest is fine by me. Mayor we could also try a more jam like approach and lower the time the challenge will last. Maybe a week or weekend challenge?

[phibermon]

You make some valid points that need to be considered if we were to hold an AI challenge. But do you have an overall point I'm missing? It's not clear to me if you think the AI challenge is a bad suggestion or if you're simple pointing out things that must be considered.

Only points to be considered, my overall theme is that it would be difficult to judge different examples of AI against each other due to the large number of disciplines involved.

Here's my idea for a compo :

take a simple working pascal game with available source.

People submit their own modifed/extended version of the game.

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Would make for a tight compo with a nice even playing field.

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A text adventure compo would be good too, just to see the range of ideas

[SilverWarior]

What I'm saying is that while AI challenge would be nice for some of us it won't be for others. Since making of even easy AI requires good knowlege of programing and understanding how computers are processing information it would be quite hard for a newbie programers to do anything useful.
You need to understand something. The best way for us as comunity to atract new members is to organize this kind of challenges so that everyone has atleast a decent chance of sucsseding.
I myself have now been learning of pascal programing for about 10 years and I still have quite a lot of problems designing AI for one of my games (making proper decision to chose which goods to buy and where to sell them, deciding how planetary colonies eveolve, etc).

[wodzu]

I am with @pstudio here. I even suggested the same idea in the other thread. The game really does not have to be that complicated. I remember such contest in the 8 bit Atari times.
I think the biggest problem is that someone must have to prepare the core mechanism. We could do it all togheter, we could host this project on some site and commit changes there.

[User137]

We could do it all togheter, we could host this project on some site and commit changes there.

That is very easy with Google docs today. People can write the same file at the same time, and that's huge benefit over clumsy to setup SVN and similar. You don't need to start a real project page for it either, but share 1 folder for more people with edit rights.

[WILL]

Well the AI bot ideas is something to consider for a future event I guess. Of course if someone wanted to co-ordinate, run and organize a separate PGD event such as an AI competition with it's own "arena" platform to run it on that could be something that could be discussed. Why not create a separate thread to see what level of interest there is? The community could support more than 1 type of event if there is enough people willing to participate.

So for a "game jam" style of challenge for the next PGD Challenge event, show of hands who would be in for that? And when is a good time?