> Hello. > > Given the issues surrounding Python and it being mandatory or not, I'd > like to suggest the following: > * AI can be a dynamic library / DLL file, loaded at use time > * WML for a map specifies the AI to use, builtin or a specific plugin, > and if plugin whether it's a mandatory plugin or AI can be changed for > builtin >
technically doable, both windows and unix know how to dinamically load some code, but I'm not sure it's doable. 1) if your AI is not in an interpreted language, then you need either have the user compile it himself (not doable under windows) or provide the plugin with the binary release (which makes the whole point moot, since we include the AI script anyway) 2) if it's interpreted, the AI would then relly on external libraries that we would force the user to install (ok, not we the wesnoth team, but the UMC with it's custom AI) we avoid the problem with python by providing the python installer within wesnoth, but UMC can't do that since we can't allow something like that, and they don't know on what platform they run anyway 3) the idea of making external AI optional seems a good idea, but on second thought it wouldn't work because if the normal AI can do the work, you usually don't do a second one. Of course there is the case of someone trying to write a "better AI" for MP, but I don't think this case will be very common, I see python AI being used more for special cases, AI avoiding fight, neutral critters on map (units on the same wesnoth team, but that don't play as team) etc etc.... and these can't be replaced by the normal AI as for player needing python, it's just like when we addeg gettext (and sdl, but I wasn't there at that time) we will have problems for a couple of dev releases while we iron out the bugs in our release process, and then it'll go on smoothly and we will forget about that... call me optimistic, but I'm not too worried about that. remember, 1.1.0 is the first release with python, so the packagers have to learn to cope with this new thing... in a couple of release, it will be routine cheers Boucman
