VicenteCartas

There are a few good suplements for d20 that deal with empires (Empire, Fields of Blood,...) or huge battles, armies and combat (Cry Havoc! that book is sooo good).

[quote who="pomalley" reply="12" id="3316689"] My understanding is that this is similar to how chess AI's work--they have a method for rating the strength of various board positions and then go down the decision tree and figure out which move will benefit them the most. As far as doing it again goes, well, it seems to me that FE is not as amenable to such an approach because it's much more complicated (I think). And as I said before, I personally never got good enough at GCII to

I have to say I don't agree that hardware is the limiting factor (as I don't agree that RTS are dying either). There is no hardware related issue that made Blizzard make Starcraft 2 a nearly carbon copy of Starcraft 1, while Relic has managed to put original RTS games out there for their whole career (with better or worse luck, but at least exploring original design directions with most of them). AI for example, it has not evolved really much in the last years, nor the budget

You need to code mostly to gain that skill :) Start writing your game in a simple Game class with Initialize and the typical Update/Draw loop. Then, as you add more things, it will become impossible to handle. Move to a Screens design, where the main game just run different Screens, and those screens handle different parts of the game (the Menu, the Game, the End,...). Little by little, you will organize code in those screens, some managers (InputManager, SoundManager,...) and

Very interesting post, specially for devs who usually know very little about all of this :)

[quote who="tetleytea" reply="15" id="2986147"] But -- in general -- writing APIs that allow the AI to easily get as much useful information so that the AI programmer can easily put together strategies is crucial. Actually, this is the part I'm more interested in: how to go about writing an API? I'm about to take on a BIG task. To the tune of writing something like OpenGL. And I don't mean writing IN OpenGL--I m

You should go for ebook self-publishing instead of doing it the traditional way if you really want to write (you won't do much money either, but you will be able to write the book you want to write). That market is huge in the USA right now, and much more interesting for novel writers than the traditional way (which is dying slowly).

Behavior Trees are pretty well described in a lot of articles in aigamedev.net, as Champandard (owner of the site) loves that technique. They have been mostly used in FPS games (although I think Demigod used BTs or GOAP which is pretty similar, not 100% sure). But for learning, and for doing something for Heroes 2, you can go happily with Finite State Machines first, and then try more complicated things if you feel like it.

Then I would probably go with Mat Buckland book. It´s cheap, it requires little formal training, it´s very easy to read, it comes with a ton of examples, and it explains the most important algorithms and ideas right now in game AI (the only big one missing are Behavior Trees).

Best book resource to start learning about game AI programming is probably this book: Programming Game AI by Example by Mat Buckland Very good book, really well explained. For general AI (a more academical approach), the best book is the classic: Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig This book can be hard to read as it is very formal. And best forum and online resource for game AI is:

There are some AIs that are pretty good (it will be nearly impossible to beat them). They will just build airports and have so much more money than you before you realize :p

[quote who="Tridus" reply="281" id="2890868"] Quoting VicenteC, reply 265 This is the most biased thing I have read in a long time. Of course it is. So is yours. Do you think this is a discussion, or a government fact finding mission? First, for nearly all creators, pricing and size limitations aren't a problem at all. Trial can be 8 minutes or something else, it's up to the creators. The timed trial is the default one so you can save yourself the work of doin

[quote who="Tridus" reply="242" id="2889358"] Quoting VicenteC, reply 239 You'll be surprised to know you can put a game on the 360 without Microsoft approval, it's called Indie Games, and they are peer-reviewed, not reviewed by MS, in fact, MS employees are forbidden to do peer-review. Provided you want to release a game that's under 150MB, sells for 400 MS points or less, has an 8 minute trial period, and can't use XBL's achievements or leaderboards. aka: They meet

[quote who="Tridus" reply="236" id="2889343"] Quoting scratchthepitch, reply 235 Let steam take over the console gaming industry - I don't like console games and never play them. But if steam is able to take over pc gaming, we'll likely see pc gaming looking like console gaming with pc game quality and variety going out the window. This is besides the increased costs to the customer and lack of consumer control that steam would institute once they got powerful enough to get away wit

I would like to correct Xbox Live Arcade to Xbox Live Indie Games, to publish in Arcade you need a contract with MS, which is veeery hard :)

I do know plenty of gamers that have problems with Steam but do not post on internet.

Even if you try a Tetris, a game where you don't need to think nearly at all about the mechanics, you will find that coding the game to a "complete" state (with scores, saves, credits,...) takes a looot of time (and then add polish, hehe, that's a time sink :p). Porting the game later to another platform is much much faster.

[quote who="UmbralAngel" reply="7" id="2807276"]I suggest using free stuff whenever possible. There is lots of LGPL stuff for you to use, just look for stuff that has a strong support community (Active forums).[/quote] Just one minor thing, XNA and Visual Studio Express are totally free too (in cost) even if their sources are not with a public license (although you can just look at it when debugging with Reflector if you feel like it).

[quote who="huminado" reply="6" id="2807131"]Very cool! I will certainly spend another day or so looking at XNA. I guess multi-platform portability is a core issue, and one I would have to dig pretty hard to learn about. For example, I'm assuming to go from XNA to Android is a major re-write, and not just due to adjusting the UI to a touch-screen. I'm pretty stuck on the idea of starting in 3D - even if it means extra work to begin with. [Also (jus

If you want to go C++, you could use the Dark GDK, although you can check a little more, there are tons of frameworks/engines out there for C++ (but not many ideas from me, I'm not a C++ guy :( ). Your other alternative would be going C#. There you have two alternatives: - SlimDX: this is a managed wrapper of DirectX for C#. This is the option if you want to fight with all the low-level details of writing a graphic engine, or you want DX10 or DX11 cool things. - XNA: X

[quote who="Mtn_Man" reply="233" id="2782777"] Quoting Nesrie, reply 228Civ IV had all these issues, and was still praised and enjoyed by many (not all).... Exactly my point. Elemental has been brutally criticized for things that reviewers gleefully overlooked in Civ 4 and now Civ 5.[/quote] - You forgot Elemental developers themselves have admitted that the game launch was a total mess? - Most gaming sites waited for several patches to do their review of Eleme

[quote who="Nesrie" reply="255" id="2782471"] Quoting Rebell44, reply 253IMO its better strategy than Civ4, because of one unit per hex and limited resources. Yeah but is it a better game as in more fun? I don't really play Civ games to get a war game fix. There was always more appeal to the series than moving units around trying to have strategic battles.[/quote] I've been playing the game (demo) and I think it is more fun. Or at least now moving units around feel mor

I don't want to imagine the marks of Civ V when it gets released and gets the 0-day patch :p

Well, some ideas for the rework of the combat system: - Units get to move and do one other action per turn (attack, cast spell, use special ability). No more action points. - Players move one unit at a time until all of them have moved for the turn. - Have attack and defense to calculate the probability of hitting. If the hit lands then there is a damage attribute that gets deducted from the hit points. Magic works the same, but it has a different defense attribute (re

Very sad day indeed, it was a great service :(