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ORIGINAL: Don Bowen

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ORIGINAL: TheElf

To be fair we only dealt with an online peanut gallery for a about a year and a half...though it feels longer.

Much longer....

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ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

AndyMac

My goodness - Andy came in rather late to the project - but has more than made up for his late arrival with his efforts. He started off taking charge of the British, Indian and Dutch (IIRC) OOBs.

When Treespider had to leave the project mid-stream (Tree eventuall returned in a different role) - Andy stepped up to take the Land Team Lead role (I'll bet he often regrets that decision!). This got him involved in most of the other Allied OOBs to some extent.

Then came the AI. Originally we thought it would be a simple matter to groom the existing scripts and plug in the new bases and units. For six months we tried this - and kept thinking "it is almost working". Then I got a call from Andy while at Origins last year - and he told me the AI was bad broke and could not be fixed. I don't recall the exact time table - but I wrote up a short 2 page spec - and sent over to Andy and James - they both liked it. I ran the idea by Erik he agreed (were we all crazy?) and we jumped off the cliff!!! We decided to ditch the AI processor - and write a new one! This also allowed us to pull the "scripts" out of the code and put them in the editor. This made scripting much easier - and now programmer involvement was not required.

Well it took about 3 months to get things "almost working" again - but now we knew we were controlling things and knew we could eventually solve any issues.

Well I won't bore everyone with the details - but here - over a year after we jumped off the cliff - we are now ready to let every one else try it out. I'm sure like any AI it can be beaten and it will get boring eventually - but it seems far more active than stock and I think it will entertain for some time. I'm currently trying Japanese against the AI and struggling :)

So, Andy is the guy that really drove making the AI work. I guess I was the initial "inspiration" and remained as a coach and cheerleader during the months - but James fixed the code and Andy fixed the scripts and they finally got it to work. Of course many team members contributed - especially Don - who had to keep helping out with the "nada-Naval AI" :D

But everyone who will play against the AI owns Andy (and James) their thanks - these guys are the ones who made the aeAI work!!!

Thanks Andeeee!!!

aeAIaeAIaeAI !!!

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ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

You know we should point out a fact that perhaps we take as obvious - but perhaps not everyone else thinks about. We - the AE Team - stand on some pretty broad shoulders.

Yes, we worked thousands of man hours on AE - probably many more hours than the original team - but maybe they worked more efficiently than we did [:)]. As I got into the code - I was amazed that it worked as well as it did - why? Because there really isn't that much of it - especially the "AI" code - in WITP that is. I think we wrote many more lines of code for the function points we added and changed - but then we are not Garys[:)].

As to the research, we had 10-12 guys doing what 1-2 guys did for the original and our guys (and maybe the originals) had been researching this war for 10-20-30 years in some cases. We probably win the "research" comparision - we smoothered the original effort with resources.

But when it comes to the overall efficiency of the WITP design - I would like to stand back and take my hat off to Gary, Keith and Michael Woods, the original programming team and say that I think in many ways their effort surpasses ours. It blazed the trail, it gave us the inspiration and hecque of course it gave us the code base. AE is what it is - and I think given the maginitude of changes it deserves it's "stands alone" rating - but we know we stand on the shoulders of those that came before us and we salute them!!! [&o][&o][&o]

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ORIGINAL: Andy Mac

Yup what they achieved with the AI was spectaculer no idea how they managed it

We ended up brute forcing it

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It is sort of like that scene in "Raising Arizona" where Nick Cage is trying to catch all of those babies. He no sooner gets one under control when three or four go scurrying off in different directions. I have found my subs in the strangest places and ugrading them is a

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ORIGINAL: wdolson

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ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

Bill supported Kelley in this effort and together they have really made things look better.

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ORIGINAL: TOMLABEL
And great support he has given!!![&o]

As already mentioned, Bill is just one of the great programmers we have on the team; however, he is one of several programmers on the team who understands us 'art' guys!!! We owe many kudos for his support given to all the crazy ideas us art guys came up with and finding a way (code-wise) to make it work! [&o][&o][&o]

Growing up with a professional photographer probably helped. I'm like Joe, I can't do much in the way of art, but having lived with one, I did gain some appreciation for the process of creating a visual presentation and the artwork in a game is important.

I have wondered if some people are subconsciously drawn to naval games over land games because of the calming blue map?

Doing the code was easy. I appreciate that I had someone as talented and easy to work with as you was doing the "hard part". [:)]

Bill

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ORIGINAL: Terminus

I'm dead inside, does that count?

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ORIGINAL: bjmorgan

Good grief, man. You make it sound like they're all dead. [&:]

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ORIGINAL: czert2

any idea in which we can expect new patch and what it will bring ?

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ORIGINAL: Numdydar

You had to resurect a 2 year old thread versus starting a new one? As a FYI this is against the forum rules too resuracting old threads like this.

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A new "official" patch is very, very unlikely. Michaelm's beta patches get the job done.