Re: [glob2-devel] Creature AI

[martin . voelkle]

Hello

> You're right that I had been thinking of some sort of binary
> representation for genes, as there was this thought in the back of my
> head "they're never gonna let me stick LISP into a game like this just
> for the sake of some crazy GA idea".  Then TMM mentioned he was thinking
> about replacing SGSL with Lua once the 1.0 version comes out, and I was
> happy :)
>
> If Lua does go into the game some day (and I realise this isn't
> certain), I would be very interested in adding hooks into the game to
> make glob behaviour programmable.  I would assume that time-consuming
> functions will always need to be implemented in C++, but giving even a
> little control over to players would open up some interesting
> possibilities in the game.  In the long-term, my intention would be to
> make the system of hooks complete enough that you could write a genetic
> algorithm (or do I have to call it a genetic program now?) purely in
> Lua.

I had proposed to write a new language, but I currently have no time since I'm
in the middle of my CS master final project (NCT is one of my assistants, I
wonder how he does all this). It's not about GA, so I have absolutely no
knowledge of them.

It's not that trivial to hook up a different language in the game. The main
problem is that the runtime environment has to be both deterministic and
suspendable/storable. The current language, developed by the other Martin, has
these two features: it executes exactly the same amount of instructions in the
same order at each step for every game step and its state can be snapshoot in a
saved game. I know lua is simple and used in many games, so it might have the
desired features.

One other problem is that if you want to mutate the programs (like the lisp
people always said they could and no other language could but never actually did
it), you have to mess with lua's internal code representation, which might be
far from trivial if possible.

> In the short-term, I've got rather into cleaning up the website (wikis
> are good :) and trying to make sense of the source code.  Since
> documentation is the major thing that seems to be lacking in Glob2 right
> now, I figure I'm best sticking to mundane details like that until after
> the 1.0 release.

Wikis are good but there is no good wiki.

Martin