Want to read about the game's creator losing pitifully to his own AI?

[x4000]

Oh yeah, it surprises even me routinely.  That's the beauty of an emergent AI, I guess.  Really, it wouldn't work any other way, since I was firstly creating it for myself to play with my dad and uncle and so forth.  If I was able to predict what the AI would do, and would never lose, it would be pointless as a game for me, even if others could get a few months out of it before figuring it all out.  So I'm glad I succeeded in the design goal of making the game not only interesting to others, but also interesting and challenging to myself.  That's harder than one might think.

That just means you are a very good AI programmer. Please never work for a robotics firm.

No joke -- but my dad, uncle and myself (same uncle that plays Ai war) have been working on a pair of robots since 2003. The are tel-presence robots that we use to remotely drive around each others houses during family gatherings since my uncle lives far away from the rest of us. But, never fear, the are entirely human controlled, with no ai whatsoever. More like an Internet-controled rc car with more bulk, more battery, a camera and swivel, and more other features in general. Very harmless, not a terminator precursor.

[x4000]

Nice job relocating the AAR forum!  I hope it gets more traffic now, too.

Hopefully so!

[Echo35]

Very harmless, not a terminator precursor.

You say that now, but one of these days, you'll have a time traveler appear in your house and then you'll know we're hosed.

[x4000]

[TheMachineIsSentient]

First, let me just extend my fan boy appreciation for this game. This is the best kept secret- why didn't anyone tell me??  I know that a lot of people don't like steam, and they may look down on steam people, but I like to play there because they made it easy to manage games. That aside, thank you for bringing it to steam. To the designer, and Pablo, and the graphics team, you have done a great job, and I hope that this party can continue for awhile. Games are only fun for me if they are hard and force me to be creative. If I can win with one eye closed and half-asleep, it's not fun. I am a programmer for a day job, and I can tell you that on those days where the assignment is a snore, it is the worst and slowest days of the year. So it is nice to come home to a game like this that can really make me struggle. It's not fun if it's not hard. Thank you!

Okay, so maybe that was too long of a appreciation post. What I really wanted to say was that if you are able to put replay functionality, we could take fraps videos and do our own battle reports on YouTube. I do create short videos when I play certain games to show my friends. I also think that the ability to pass around replays would be highly instructional as well as entertaining to watch on my big screen TV.

Just a thought, maybe it's the wrong forum? This would enable your AI battle report articles forum, though.

Consider me your supporter of AI war- if you bring the challenge, I'll be around to beat it. 

I read somewhere about a puzzle game, I own a lot of puzzle games ( I like real-life ones too, if anyone wants to get me a birthday present  ). I hope that you tell us about that soon.

[x4000]

Hi TheMachineIsSentient, welcome to the forums and thanks for your support!  Glad you are enjoying the difficulty.

I've written about replay functionality elsewhere (in a couple of interviews, and posts here, I think -- I'm pretty sure it was in The Claw interview with me), but the main issue with that is that every patch (of which there are several per week) would break the replay, and the replays would be hundreds of MB in size, if not more, given the large nature of input for the game, and the amount of time games last.  It's a feature I had originally really wanted for the game, but the technical challenges on that one pretty much nixed it.  Even so, using XFire is a great way to take gameplay videos and have them automatically uploaded to the XFire servers for replay or linking from here or elsewhere.  I highly recommend XFire (which is free) for AI War and/or anything else where you want to take in-game videos of a game that doesn't have a replay function.

Regarding the upcoming puzzle game, there is a brief bit about it on the left sidebar of the main Arcen site, but more info is coming this month.  My goal is to have a public beta and preorder option for the game within 2-4 weeks, but we'll see how that goes.  We're very excited about the game, at any rate.

Thanks again for your support!

[raptor331]

Ha I can now relate to X4000, I neglected to improve my defenses and it came around and bit me in the rear end.

http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,3287.0.html