Being able to work in Lisp instead of C++ is a big win, but always remember all the user will care about is whether it's fun or not and not what language it's implemented in.
This is fantastic. RTS game design is antiquated and severely bloated (partially from developer laziness and publishers not wanting to invest money into the genre since it's relatively niche and not a big seller on consoles).
Games won't be able to compete on art and graphics for long. Look at Crysis--it's nearly photorealistic. Once the curve of graphics improvement reaches its asymptote, developers will have to start innovating on gameplay.
I wish there were more games that exposed their internal operation or made it part of the gameplay. It seems like many hacker news readers would enjoy a game in which you assemble an AI in competition with other AIs -- what I'd like is a game that allowed you to do that with varying levels of abstraction. A nice API for an RTS engine would make that possible, I guess.
And, on a tangent: it'd be cool if more games responded to the way people "cheat" at computer games, like if there was a game that made saving and restoring state an actual part of the gameplay...
Yes, sometimes when I'm playing a game I'll come up with an algorithm to handle some aspect of it (e.g. adjusting the tax rate), but the game doesn't allow scripting so I have to run the algorithm by hand.
Also, check out Bolo and the many bots available for it (if you can find a way to run it - maybe someone should clone it in Flash).
"It seems like many hacker news readers would enjoy a game in which you assemble an AI in competition with other AIs -- what I'd like is a game that allowed you to do that with varying levels of abstraction."
A research project in neural networks for games called NERO at the University of Texas is along the lines of what you are talking about:
I've had the same ideas, that the situation with AI or any scientific tools in the gaming mainstream is unsatisfactory. I had to deal a lot with AI air traffic control in MSFS2004 and it was noteable that they abandoned it's development as soon as it was able to do all the chain of basic operations from taxiing and takeoff to approach and vacating the runway. The real-life ATC are always sloving an optimisation problem, which is the most crucial at approach. Of course, AI ATC doesn't care to optimize anything and may make a poor a/c go around forever.
One problem with AI is that it can't be estimated quickly by game reviewers. It takes much time to notice it's patterns, probably it takes to complete all the missions up to the end. As a result, AI quality doesn't affect game's grades much enough to care about it.
Another thing is that many game developers are good at algorythms and programming, but not (if at all) at game theory, and social math theories (like evolutionary dynamics), and optimal control.
This looks like it could be great -- it breaks it down to gameplay without fancy 3d engines.
You should put an email signup on the site so that people who want to play the game when it's really playable can keep it in mind. Otherwise we might not remember the web address.
