Just a note on progress and
what I need from you.
The merchant AI is working really well now. It's fun for me as developer so see the "thought" process in the Live Tuner. They look at many options weighting them by cost, time-discounted gain, travel time and other area opportunities (exactly as outlined in posts 89 & 99). They don't consider options that another GP from the same civ is headed for. If there are too many options (>50), then a city size heuristic is applied to lower the number the next time (for performance). Once they make a decision, they go to the plot and perform the action. If the action doesn't work for some reason, they reconsider. There is also the possibility for the "Civ AI" to interrupt a GP to allow it to reconsider if a new (possibly urgent) opportunity arises. However, generally speaking, an AI merchant doesn't reconsider options until it has gone to and finished its current selected option.
What I have now is a "debug build". Each full civ spawns exactly 3 merchants, which can do all merchant actions unconstrained by tech/policy prereqs. I don't want to release this build in the OP because it is just going to confuse people. I'll probably release it here in a post (in a day or so) for anyone following that is interested in seeing AI in action (or AI code). Unfortunately, once I get going on another GP type, I'll be adding another long list of bugs to work through.
I'm kind of racing with G&K. My goal is to get these GP AIs all working, plus AI selection of techs & policies, and all "phase 1 features" (post 3 & 4) before G&K release. What will we have then? Well, an excruciatingly unbalanced mod that only has placeholder art. Not at all appealing, is it? But at least then I can start to do some really course balancing adjustments while converting to G&K and adding phase 2 stuff (new race, religion, and some other mechanics).
what I need from you
Continued evaluation of ideas is always helpful. I don't always follow suggestions but I always consider them carefully.
2D art. There are really two parts. You can PM me or just post here if interested in helping:
- Looking at my tech tree, you will see that they all just have the "sailing" icon. This is kind of drudgery work, but if anyone wants to fill in the appropriate icons (or add custom icons) to tables, I would really appreciated it. (I code all tables in SQL, but it is very easy to see where icon tags need to go.)
- I have about 100 portraits going in to phase one (maybe 200 - 300 with phase 2). These are all jpegs that need conversion to dds format (using Gimp). My mod has a sort of "dynamic scaling" function that allows it to use portraits with different aspect ratios, but this requires some fairly specific file naming and jpg->dds conversion rules to be followed. I also will need an "icon" version of each person cropped out from the original. I'll be happy to talk specifics with anyone who is interested.
3D art. Unfortunately, 10000 lines of code don't make a fantasy mod if it doesn't have fantasy unit art. It may be best to wait a while on this on the chance that unit art will get easier with G&K (but who knows?). Eventually, I'll just bite the bullet and learn how to do this myself, but that may be a long long time from now. Until this happens, however, the mod is (at best) in a "development/testing" stage and not a real game.