Oh man, it’s been a while.  Being a classic software engineer, last time I was starting on getting AI working in game, assuming it would be fairly easy. Reader, it was not easy

Thankfully, it worked out eventually and the game now has a workable single player setup. Granted, the computer does need a decent amount of “thinking time” for its move, and it still struggles to find good moves for Goregrinders units. Caveats aside, I see these as very fixable problems, and I'm excited to continue development.

CPU Opponent

Honestly, getting this set up was one of the hardest things i’ve done since I started programming.  Even if it’s janky, i’m pretty proud of it.

The CPU opponent is powered by the general purpose “Monte Carlo Tree Search” algorithm (which is what is often used for chessbots, and a key part of “AlphaGo”’s algorithm). In my testing I've found its performance varies depending on the list it is given. It can reasonably pilot C.A.R.C.A.S.S. lists, but struggles to find reasonable moves when running a Goregrinders list. Another big caveat is this system is still rather slow, and should be given at least 768 MB working memory and at least 20 seconds of thinking time per turn.  It will occasionally get tripped up and have to start over.  I've had fun letting it run in the background and occasionally alt-tabbing back to take my turn before alt-tabbing away again. In order to support this sort of local-async play style, i’ve also added some additional features, such as a dedicated windowed mode and AI action history.

I definitely want to talk more about getting MCTS working but i’ll leave it there.

Additional Settings

I’ve added the start of what will one day be a proper game settings screen that is accessible from the main menu.  Here you can toggle between windowed and fullscreen mode, change your selection for opting into sending me crash reports, and configure the CPU opponent. One day there will be more here.

Additional Bugfixes

Bullet Sonata would cause a crash the next time any other soul act was used.

Skull crack wasn’t pushing, and missing when it should have hit

Sign off

The Indix Infernalis beta can be downloaded here:

Unit token art is done by Tom Bloom/@orbitaldropkick, author of the MAGNAGOTHICA MALEGHAST ruleset and is not my own work. Tokens and rules are available here if you want to support his work (which you should).

If you like this project, please share this devlog wherever you found it. More interest means I'm more likely to follow through and finish this thing. See you next time!