== July 1 == Problems, Solutions & Starting the fun part

Ahoy. I wanted to post this report on Friday, as usual, but due to some extraneous circumstances (coupled with a 3-day wilderness trip Saturday-Monday) I was only able to get one out today.

In the past week of coding I have encountered several problems. First of all, there are a couple of issues related to the ruleset, which are still standing. First of all, there is the issue of mapping numeric-to-actual ship-types. I was hoping that it would be hard coded (e.g. scout is always 1, Mk.1 destroyer is always 3, etc) , but nash suggested that it might be determined by the server at runtime. I'm still waiting for the final word from xdotx on that.

Another issue with the ruleset I encountered, was the complete inability to produce anything on newly colonized planets, since any amount of colonists magically disappears from the surface, and no resource-points are being generated thereafter (although I still apparently own the planet). This observation was made on tpclient-pywx, and confirmed by my own client. I'm still waiting for word from xdotx for what this might be. (Smells like a bug, but perhaps I'm missing something?)

Finally, there was an issue with sending orders, that was related to the proto-library, which jezuch quickly remedied, and now I'm able to successfully pass orders to my assets in the game-world. I proved this by implementing the "fleet-move" order, and successfully moved my fleet around the universe.

So, what is still missing in terms of client functionality (out of the stuff that I really need, that is), is production, fleet merge, fleet split orders, and numeric-to-actual ship mapping. What I want to concentrate now on, is the actual logic and overall architecture of the bot. I already introduced some convenient algorithms into my representation of the universe map (get n-closest star systems, get contents of star system, get distance). I will be adding to these as I go along developing the robot logic, and hopefully by the end of the week I'll have a good skeleton to build on, and some concrete algorithms to control the behavior of the bot.

Later,
Victor.

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Victor Ivri (vi1985)
Blog address: BLOG
You can find the project in the git repo here: REPO