AI Sim Attempt · 12:16am Jul 21st, 2014
http://kschnee.xepher.net/pics/code_projects/140720liberty.png
I've been banging on a coding project. A few years ago I did some hobbyist AI stuff, even entering the Loebner Prize Contest one year. I built a simple game server called Morningside ( http://kschnee.xepher.net/code/morningside/screenshots/090918morningside_level.jpg ), which lets players (human or AI) log in and communicate using text files to control simplistic characters. Later, I built a successor program called "Liberty" which has a bigger world, limited vision, and character facing, along with optional socket-based connections.
I'm now attempting to dust the cruft off of that and use it for AI, but about 100% of my effort has been going into the server program itself. It's old code so I hardly remember how it works, it was buggy to begin with, and it's never quite what I want. In trying to plug in some newer code I've been seeing more and more garbage and bugs that consume all of my effort away from doing any of the AI that is the whole point.
I'm revising the wording of what I was going to post yesterday, because after hours of banging on it (not fun enough to be called playing with it), I've got something with basic functionality. A little animated sprite character moving around randomly on a 100x100 tile grid, with turn-based movement and simple commands. The character is not part of the "server" program running the game, but is a separate program communicating with it. I've got a "BIOS" program that just wanders around, and the shell of an actual AI program that does the same thing but has the start of more infrastructure for actually doing things with the input it gets. So... maybe I'm past the "100% unfun groundwork" part.
If anyone cares I can release the server program and BIOS demo program. The server's designed so that you don't need Python in particular to run it, just the ability to open an IP socket connection or even just to read and write text files. (I'm a bit bothered by the text file method just because it involves constant if low wear on the hard drive.)
Still, the server is clunky and limited. No display of text at the moment, for instance, and no pause button or easy way to spawn items.
So you're saying it's time to destroy the world? Ok!