Crossfire Archive
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Re: Intelligent Clients (was Re: CF: hello)
On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Martin Wille wrote:
> > So yes, ai clients that play the game could be designed.
> > I don't really see the point in it, however.
>
> An intelligent client would be a way to introduce new NPCs without
> "disturbing"
> the server code. Those NPCs could walk across maps, gain experience, interact
> with other players ...
> I think that those new NPCs could be very interesting, since they could have a
> kind of personal history.
In Mud circles (and Crossfire is to my mind, very much a type of Mud,
given a sane definition), these are generally called 'Bots'. Two types
exist - the abusive player type (alluded to at the top), and the
server-side version used to create very interactive NPCs.
Why run them this way? It lets you use a language of your choice
(something like Perl or Python is typical) and work on the input and
output data sent to you (obviously this is more complex than just text
parsing in Crossifire). It also offloads the CPU cost of AI NPCs from the
server, as they can be run from any number of remote machines. A good
thing (tm). :)
-Matt Chatterley
http://user.itl.net/~neddy/
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.." -John Lennon (Imagine)
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