The two biggest projects in converting GB to the remastered engine are the screens and the AI. Looking back on how I did the AI dll, I'm not very happy with the work. It's very limiting and hard to understand. I am looking to redesign the interface as doing the same for GB is just building on a crumbling tower.
The concept of the AI is to receive the information and then issue a series of commands. It should be simple. The first pass I just moved code from the main engine to a dll and it caused a ton of odd functionality.
The forced checks should not happen in the AI. Meaning the forced fallback, retreat, and route are not AI routines. They are engine rules and therefore should not be moddable. But other items, such as the full strategic AI should be included in the DLL rather than the odd mix that is there.
The design concept that I am striving towards is where machine learning, behavior graphs, reinforcement learning, could be added if someone wanted to take on that project. Those require a clear set of commands. So you enter the AI routine and you send back a series of commands.
Of course if you really wanted to add true machine learning, you'd need to run it a LOT in order to train your model. That's also not really possible and the game is not conducive to that feature. But I can set it up that way so that it will be easier to add when we have the time.
I really hoped to get this done by the end of the year, but I'm not so sure at this point. That is still my goal, so hopefully I can get there.
PS - Americans, go vote!
Norb