Challenge for all modders out there

**The_Mark** · 03-11-2005, 16:25

Just one thing to say about RTW script engine: It's crap. It can't store variables (other than numbers), it doesn't have any functions returning values etc.

Regarding to that, I had an idea

What if one would make a proggy that'd use the information from the battle and would constantly write script commands to a file to be executed every second?

Example: A battle script calls the console command output_unit_positions, saving the positons of all units to a file. The proggy checks this file for positions. The proggy then uses the information to figure out what's going on, for exampl, flanking manouvers. When it recognises a flanking manouver it will write a command (unit_order_attack_unit plr_unit_3) to a separate script file (show_me) that is run by rome regularly.

Benefits: We can have all the commands, calculus, variables we want and need to make the AI smart.

Problems: output-command doesn't output unit status, for example, men left/ammo status/engagement status. If we can work around these there's possibly no limits.

Any thoughts?

**Myrddraal** · 03-11-2005, 17:29

Originally Posted by The_Mark

Just one thing to say about RTW script engine: It's crap. It can't store variables (other than numbers), it doesn't have any functions returning values etc.

I could have told you that...

I don't know about the whole seperate program idea. The advantage of scripting is that there are loads of things you can check up on like if a unit is being attacked in the flank of back etc...

**SigniferOne** · 03-11-2005, 18:08

I think he was saying that you could write scripts that would return all that battle data to an external program, who could at the same time do a lot more with the data than the scripts themselves.

**Myrddraal** · 03-11-2005, 20:11

No hes not, there is a command which outputs the unit positions to a file, but it doesn't output anything else...

**The_Mark** · 03-11-2005, 21:12

Originally Posted by Myrddraal

I could have told you that...

Well, I didn't expect much, but I didn't expect it to be (utter) crap either.

And if you only know the units' positions, it CAN tell you a lot of things. As the command also outputs the units' directions. So we can, in fact, check if a unit is attacked fron flanks etc. But yes, there's a lots of things that we can't test. We can assume that two units are engaged by their distance, and we could check whether a unit is attempting flanking much more reliably (and more easily).

So we have a script engine that can test stuff handily but can't do anything with it and we could make a program that would do everything we want but it couldn't check things.

Is there any other ways of extracting battle information than output_positions?

**The_Mark** · 03-12-2005, 20:18

Ahh.. Guess what: Show-me scripts are parsed at startup, so there's no way to modify them during a battle.. I guess this attempt was doomed to failure from the very beginning..

*Damn you CA*

**Myrddraal** · 03-12-2005, 21:01

Hey, don't give up

It may not be possible to edit in game, but DJs idea of having a program which generates historical battles with decent AI is a good one....