AI concept of the '80ies ... why?

[PhilD]

Esben Mose Hansen said:
Personally, I would love a way to create a script-client so we could write our owns AIs. I think I'd take a shot at doing it as a LP or maybe a MIP problem

Yeah, but scriptable in-game is way too dangerous - either the scripting language would be extremely limited, or 99.99% of scripts would just crash the game 99.99% of the time (though, Neverwinter Nights' toolset scripting language seemed to be a pretty decent sublanguage of C, and that didn't seem to cause too many stability problems; but then, the development team of NWN was orders of magnitude larger than that of Dom...)

What could work would be if the turn file format were more open, so that players could have an external program read an AI's turn, and generate orders. There would be some minor cheating issues (need for a way to have AI nations' files either in encrypted format, to prevent cheating, or unencrypted, to allow AI scripting), and some safeguards to prevent buggy programs from crashing the game through buggy orders files (simply parse the file, and if anything goes wrong, ignore it and have the in-game AI take over), but it would make it possible for all those "how hard can it be to write decent AI, this game's AI sucks" sayers to prove how much better they really are...

But then, this was a suggestion we made back in the days of Dom2, and the devs weren't too receptive.