Brit

Unfortunately, I've gotten kind of bogged down lately fixing crashes and lockups in the game. It mostly has to do with PBEM games.

Is it crashing the game or causing it to lockup during turn processing? Someone else reported that the game was locking up during turn processing, so I took a look at his saved game, tracked down and fixed the bug, and put out a new update. If the game is locking up on you during turn processing, grab the latest update (1.01.16865) and try it again. Sorry for the trouble. Brit

Hi Mike. There are three fixes in the latest version. They mostly deal with PBEM games: - Made changes to the system to help avoid crashes in PBEM games. - Changed the IM Log to show only the most recent 400 messages because it was getting overly full - Fixed bug: the PBEM games weren't showing the Turn-Processing Percentage

You can send it to my email address. I'll put it into your private messages.

By multiplayer, do you mean PBEM or regular online play?

No, the game doesn't remember what computer it was on. You should be able to copy the entire directory structure and move it to another computer. I have both a windows 7 (64-bit) computer and an XP (32-bit) computer. If you want, I can try loading a saved game on one or both computers.

I guess this has to do with the fact that units will automatically switch their orders to 'capture resource' if a new resource is discovered near them. Usually, there's only one unit near the newly discovered resource, so it's the only one that gets 'capture resource' orders. If there's more than one unit, they don't decide which one should go after it - they both go after it.

Oh. Yeah, it should replace the original. I guess if it's just in the editor, it's not too big of a deal. I was afraid maybe you found a way to get both buildings into a city while playing the game.

I originally thought maybe people were playing lots of turns in a row, and that was causing problems. I look a look at the events, and there were only about 200 game-events that day. I think the problem was caused by the excessive number of old events in the database (roughly 23,000 of them), causing the server to slow down. There is a part in the code that looks for duplicate events, which means looking through all the old events each time a new event is uploaded. I deleted a 85% of the old stuff, setup a system to automatically delete old events, and did some other stuff to speed things up, so hopefully it won't be a problem anymore. So, the biggest part of the problem was inefficient code on my side of things. I hope that fixes things, especially since my webhost is threatening to kick me off their server for excessive use. > "Can you explain what you meant by "regular PBEM"?" I mean regular multiplayer - which is the type of game where everyone is online at the same time.

The game-replays go into your saved-game folder, and you should be able to open them using the 'View Old Game' menu item.

Oops. This happened again - my webhost temporarily suspended access to the empiresofsteel website. This time, my web-host says it's because of the PBEM game "Empire40-Mar7". I may have to take a look at this issue and/or upgrade my webhost account. Edit: the "Empire40-Mar7" game doesn't seem to be taking that much bandwidth, it looks like maybe it was just the one that 'broke the camel's back'. Edit #2: I think I've got this issue sorted out now. One of the PBEM functions was putting excessive strain on the server.

You can place paratroopers inside air-transports. If your paratroopers are in the same city as your air-transport, you can drag and drop them into the aircraft. Then, you give your air-transport orders to fly somewhere. Then, select the paratroopers inside the aircraft and right-click on the air-transport's waypoint. This will give them orders to drop-off the paratroopers at that location.

The good news: the AI can now be compiled as a separate dll. The bad news: I had to make so many changes to the code that it doesn't run properly. Now it's time to start debugging.

The top right corner? I'm not sure what you're referring to. The only FPS counter should be in the upper left and you should be able to turn it on and off in the preferences. Can you post a screenshot? Yes.

My webhost sent me an email today saying that they temporarily (for one hour) disabled the database connected to the empires of steel game. They said there was excessive traffic and it was causing problems. So, if you weren't able to access the server earlier, that's why. The traffic was related to PBEM games. I suspect that what might be happening is that someone has their game up and running all the time, checking for game updates every minute or so. Or maybe some players are running through the first few dozen turns of a PBEM game very quickly. Either way, I'll have to do something to slow down the amount of traffic players are using. And, remember that PBEM games aren't the only type of multiplayer games. The "regular" multiplayer game doesn't use the game's webserver.

Notable Changes and Fixes from 1.01.16146->1.01.16335 - Added the Iranian flag - Fixed bug: the cost of upgrades was being miscalculated - Fixed bug: unit-groups could be seen at a city's default range (e.g. 80) even if the group is composed of subs which can only be seen at a distance of 40 - Fixed bug: the PBEM window would set the update time to 60 minutes - Fixed bug: sometimes user-created rulesets run into a problem where only one city-improvement can be created in a city - Fixed crash: there was a bug in the turn-processing code that could cause a crash

Tsk. I thought maybe this was going to be a thread about the lack of updates lately. Well, I guess I'll hijack the thread and say that I'm trying to get a new update out today to fix some bugs. Not much new with the AI, since I'm still disconnecting it from the game code. I can see there will be a bunch of debugging once that happens, considering the number of code changes required to break it apart.

The AI does know what tech you have researched, and it is influenced (but not heavily influenced) towards researching similar technology. (You can see what tech other players have on the foreign relations window, by the way.) The AI isn't trying to copy what you are building (in other words, building a whole bunch of subs won't influence the AI towards building a bunch of subs). Does that answer your question?

As far as interacting with the GUI: the AI won't do that. A developer would have to write some interface code so that, for example, if the AI decides to declare war on another player, that the game-code will have to receive that message and send it through the proper channels so it shows up in the GUI. As far as the map: I have a system in place for pathfinding. The game-developer would have to describe the game world as a bunch of areas and describe how they're linked together. It's very natural for grid-based games, but it also works for continuous-movement maps like EOS has. The system is already flexible enough that it can handle unusually-shaped maps as well. For example, it can already handle pathfinding on a sphere or mobius strip or other exotic shapes. As far as the unit-database, there is a way to describe each unit's movement rates across different terrain, which units it can contain, and a way to describe how well units fight against other units. This could either be setup as raw-numbers so the AI can calculate how well units fight against each other, or it could be simply setup as a bunch of combat result values (e.g. if unit A attacks unit B, it can be expected that X amount of damage is done to each side). I'm not sure how I'd be able to handle special-abilities, though, since that can be tricky. (A special ability would be stuff like: if a unit has a special weapon that can be used once every X seconds, turn invisible for a short period of time, etc.) The AI pathfinding system I've built up can take into account different speeds on different terrains and can also mark certain terrains as impassible. The game-unit's movement abilities will have to be translated into a format that the AI understands, but I don't think that will be too difficult. Some things in the game world can be assigned values for their destruction or capture. I suspect that some scripting or something might have to be involved to handle special cases. I suspect there will have to be some documentation to guide developers when the AI is behaving incorrectly for their game-world. For example, I could imagine that an AI might be building too many of unit X, and the developer would have to adjust some settings to change the balance of which units get created. It might also be interesting to add some additional features into it so the AI can learn to play. For example, attaching a genetic algorithm to the system to try different variations on building units. I'm not sure how I'd setup the AI to handle certain strategies, though. For example, setting up ambushes, or avoiding ambushes. Sometimes human players will figure out a simple, effective strategy that they can use over and over against an AI opponent to destroy them little by little. A good AI should avoid getting drawn into that. I'm not quite sure how I'll handle cases where units can be ordered to attack in a specific sequence. (For example, in Civilization, the player should hit the city with catapults first, then horses because they can retreat, then ....)

I didn't know world of warcraft used it. I've just heard that it's popular among game developers.

I think I'd have to sit down and do the math. It would be dependent on how long the game lasts. Extra oil would give you an immediate production bonus. Extra population helps, but its benefits are spread-out over the future. Also, if you're selling oil to buy food, you're probably getting a bad exchange rate, which could also influence the calculation.

Okay, there's a glitch that can affect user-created rulesets. Here's how you can get around it: go into the rules editor, open your rules, and for each city-improvement, you'll see a field called "Upgrade Line". For most of the city improvements, this is blank. Just fill in that field with the name of the improvement (e.g. for the "Barracks" just fill-in "Barracks" for the upgrade line, for "Shipyard" fill-in "Shipyard"). The factory and large factory already have "Factory" filled in.

At this point, I'm playing around with the idea of creating a generalized strategy-game AI. I've looked around for this kind of thing on the internet, but haven't had any luck. The closest I've seen to a strategy AI is that there's a handful of pathfinding AIs, but nothing that handles the larger picture. It seems like there might be a demand for it. If there's some demand to license the technology for other games, then there's some additional reasons to work on an expanded AI system. (Pathfinding AIs are used to find a path from point A in the game world to point B.) If I'm going to make a generalized, licensable AI system, I'll have to add a scripting mechanism. I don't know what I'll use. I think LUA has been pretty popular as a scripting language, but haven't looked into enough to make a decision about it yet.

That's a strange error. Send me an email with your ruleset included. I should be able to see what's going wrong with the debugger. If you don't know the email, I'll put it in your private messages (so I can avoid the spambots).

Ah, I hadn't thought about the satellite one. I'll have to get to it later. I'm working on getting greater separation between the AI and the game itself right now, which requires thousands of changes to the code. Once I get finished with that, I'll take another look at these issues. Feel free to remind me.