AI Wars Featured on Facebook

My work is featured on the Facebook page for the language I made it in. That's a pretty big accomplishment for a single programmer.

Remember AI Wars? I uploaded what I had of it - 75 megabytes total:

AI Wars

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AI Wars

posted by NKWeeks

Wed, Dec 14 2011

3 comments

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Download

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Downloads: 8

File size: 40.9kB

Views: 88

Filed under: 3D terrain, games, ai

shown: AI Wars gameplay screenshot

DOWNLOAD LINK: http://www.mediafire.com/?by833bb8u2q3bgc
tl;dr version: read the bold text.
AI Wars is a game I've been working on for a couple years now, but I haven't found time to continue it, and I doubt it'll ever get finished, so here's what I have of it.
Gameplay isn't what you'd expect. Instead of controlling one ship/person at a time, like most games, you control a whole fleet of robots - using nothing but AI - to defeat massive swarms of enemies using AI in the same way you do. The game comes with a detailed help system explaining how to get your AI up and running, and over 50 missions (if I recall correctly), as well as the capability to pit your AI against that of your friends. The gameplay difficulty level is high.Don't get frustrated if you can't pass a level - just look at the enemy AI files and see if you can scrounge something to help you adapt.
This program won't work too well on slower computers. 2 Ghz of processor power should be enough, but it'll be slow. Also, the game will crash. There were memory leak issues that pop up on occasion that I couldn't manage to come up with workarounds for. The .kpl file is included, but be forewarned - it's very obfuscated. You may get terribly confused while reading it (I did, often). It's a grand total of 7183 lines of code, so if you get lost, don't worry - you aren't the first.
The download is 75 MB in size - far too big to upload to Phrogram's website. As a result, you download it from Mediafire (link above). It doesn't come as a packaged setup.exe - Phrogram crashes whenever I try to package it. Too big, I guess. Phrogram probably wasn't intended for anything on this scale. *shrug*
If you have any issues, let me know. I'm still not sure I packaged everything correctly. If you have any questions - fire away. I'm sure there will be many.
KNOWN ISSUES (the ones I can remember from a year ago):

• Robots don't always respect boundaries, i.e. walls, forests, pits - this would probably be fixed (for the most part) with a faster processor, which I lack. 
• AI for terrain avoidance is sketchy at best. Try not to get to angry at me. I know you'll want to.
• If you screw something up in the AI file, it won't tell you what the problem is, if I remember right. You'll probably have to figure it out for yourself. Playing with the .kpl would probably help you figure out what the problem is a little easier - if you can get past the code obfuscation.
• Random crashes. I took great pains to get rid of issues that made it crash or run slowly, to the extent that it reloads sprites at the start of every battle. Despite this, it still crashes. Just like The Tribes did.

But, excepting this, enjoy! It's a new genre of game, and it may take some time to figure out, but it's entertaining in the end.

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davidw wrote re: AI Wars

on Wed, Dec 14 2011 5:38 PM

Not sure why it did that but I think I fixed it. NK, this is an amazing game. I hadn't heard from you lately so I was wondering if you were still programming in Phrogram. Now I see that you are, and that your work is at the bleeding edge of what the program can do. Very cool! I put the premise screen on Phrogram's Facebook page and thought I'd tweet about this as well - there are  other programmers who do amazing stuff with Phrogram - e.g., LFS who just uploaded his kaleido-colors program - but for complex 3D gaming in Phrogram, you are the reigning champ!  

(davidw is the guy in charge of everything to do with Phrogram... pretty much the lead guy, now.)
Of course, you'll note I haven't even finished AI Wars. It's not even halfway done, really - I just couldn't finish it. Too much artwork involved.
I'm not sure why he called it "3D gaming", though... AI Wars is two-dimensional. Either way, it was great to be recognized. Gave me a confidence boost I kind of needed - now I'm skipping out on C++ (temporarily, I already have a lot of it down) to finish ACV (another of my games) - something I've been needing to do for close to a year.