Author Topic: [Rejected] Game control API (ability to replace the UI)  (Read 2202 times)

Offline TheCurse

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[Rejected] Game control API (ability to replace the UI)
« on: November 24, 2019, 05:15:30 am »
Rejection reason: this is beyond/outside the scope of OXCE


Now this may be a little bit odd in terms of "normal" game features (and not a small thing either).

But what are the chances we could get an interface (e.g. via websockets or REST) to control the game from player side, but programmatically?
A nice side effect would be the possibility to decouple engine and game UI, not that its needed.
The main reason though is that there would be the possibility for people to write bots to run the game.

IMO there would be several perspectives to it. The most boring one is playing the game and having the bots solve difficult/grinding stuff.
Not the reason for this at all, just mentioning it for the sake of completeness. Also would be a total waste of all the great lore and effort people put in their mods.
The interesting perspectives are "is it possible to write an AI that can beat mod xyz/vanilla" (pretty sure yes, but not for everyone), logically "can i write an AI that is good enough", and just for sake of competition: "can i write an AI that can beat your AI in battlescape/game difficulty".
(If there are good AIs there´s the side effect of wasting a lot of computing power for getting great balance info)

Granted, running AIs is not about game content anymore and especially the lore/settings of the mods is outstanding for most.
On the other hand, there´s probably a lot of coders here thinking about the meta game of "could i beat this with software?".
Yet hooking into OXCE is not that easily done.

Other possible uses:
-Some attention from the AI community, since thats currently a hip topic... (like SC2 got. And just being turn based does not make xcom that much easier...)
-Better ingame AIs. Good AIs are usually hard to write. If the game is partially decoupled and there are some good AIs, they could be used ingame to replace the built in AI, for special difficulty.
(Also it´d be possible to have different AIs, depending on setting, which makes for a great feature addition)

If there are any technical concept/protocol questions I´m sure i can put up an adequate solution, but I´m guessing you engine guys absolutely can do too.  :)
Obviously if the engine is not yet built for that its a lot of work.

So, is anyone else interested in this?
And is there any slight chance it might happen?  ;D
« Last Edit: February 19, 2023, 01:34:50 pm by Meridian »

Offline Meridian

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Offline TheCurse

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Re: AI control interface
« Reply #2 on: November 25, 2019, 02:46:28 am »
Ok, got it. ^^

After carefully reading (again) I don't interpret any of that as directly saying "this is not scope".
But i do get the hint... >_>
(My guess would be it falls under "rewriting stuff", or its just way too much work)