Do you know that, during the development of Tiberian Sun, Westwood Studios actually tried to implement a system of AI Generals, where each AI houses could be associated with Generals that would provide different behaviors?
They planned to add five "Generals":
• Brain Dead - No behavior defined.
• General Meade - Strong defense, weak attack.
• General Jackson - Strong defense, strong attack.
• General Grant - Weak defense, frequent attack.
• General Hooker - Unpredictable.
But the idea was abandoned at some point, commented out. When I was a more active Tiberian Sun modder, I tried to understand the leftovers of this feature [registered users only], especially seen at ai.tlb file (but also at game.exe), and figure out if it was possible to use it.
Some days ago, CCHyper has posted detailed information about this [registered users only]. Here's a snippet:
If you are curious, visit our Tiberian Sun Research Center and check out this topic about AI Generals from CCHyper. But note that all Research forums here are restricted to registered users only. It takes few seconds to register on the forums and you don't get spammed because of that. So, it should not be a problem.
They planned to add five "Generals":
• Brain Dead - No behavior defined.
• General Meade - Strong defense, weak attack.
• General Jackson - Strong defense, strong attack.
• General Grant - Weak defense, frequent attack.
• General Hooker - Unpredictable.
But the idea was abandoned at some point, commented out. When I was a more active Tiberian Sun modder, I tried to understand the leftovers of this feature [registered users only], especially seen at ai.tlb file (but also at game.exe), and figure out if it was possible to use it.
Some days ago, CCHyper has posted detailed information about this [registered users only]. Here's a snippet:
| CCHyper wrote: |
| Some of you may know that in my free time these days, I still research the TibSun engine for the Vinifera(shameless plug) project. Last night, I was just going through the section of TibSun that handles all the AI Houses and their "per frame tick"(simple terms, the routine the game executes to process the AI house every second) rules and I noticed something, a small call to a function that seems to never get made, because its requirements are never met. I decided to research this further. We know that TibSun does not read the [AIGenerals] from the RULES.INI, we have done for some time now. But did you know that all the COM CLSID's that are defined in that list are actually embedded into the games executable? If you are into technical details, you can read up on how COM and interfaces work at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model, but in simple terms, it is the same system as Locomotors use. The TLB files that ship with the game are not necessarily useless, to people who actively reverse engineer the game or are interested in how games are programmed, they contain some great information. |
If you are curious, visit our Tiberian Sun Research Center and check out this topic about AI Generals from CCHyper. But note that all Research forums here are restricted to registered users only. It takes few seconds to register on the forums and you don't get spammed because of that. So, it should not be a problem.