Warcraft III Patch 1.18 is out, time for a new AMAI!

Check out the Warcraft III Patch 1.18 notes at
http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=mwr01696p

There's a section "WORLD EDITOR FEATURES" with the following:

"Added new unit states:
Plagued
Snared
Stunned
Poisoned
Polymorphed
Sleeping
Resistant
Ethereal
Magic Immune"

If those features are accessible from JASS programming API, then AMAI could take advantage of those for refining its tactics.

Yup. Looks very good. Especially the "is terrain passable function". I havn't yet checked but if its in the common.j, but if it is, it will be much easier for amai to calculate pathable regions and maybe even remove quite a bit of that lag at start of game.

I gonna be checking when i get home.


EDIT - Oh yeah We do HAVE common.j TERRAIN FUNCTIONS!!!!!! woohooo.


WE HAVE TERRAIN FUNCTIONS and they are available for AMAI. I going to have a lot of fun with these. :)

Many thumbs up blizzard!!!!

EDIT2 - Functions are working and amai no longer seems to have any start lag. ^_^

I was surprised to find that the 1.18 didn't break AMAI. I thought I would have to delete the AMAI map I'm using, and install AMAI 2.43 (whatever the latest one is) over a fresh, original Blizzard map. But I've played a couple times on one I had before and everything seems to work fine. Would it be advisable to start over on a fresh map, or does it matter?

The lag at the start of a game never was a significant issue to me. I don't understand why people even mention it; it's nothing. And if it's needed (or used to be) to help the AMAI scan the map, then good enough.

I sure hope AIAndy can find some time to work on a new version, but if not, that's okay. This latest version of AMAI is great competition for me.

@Strategy Master: That's good news! AMAI will now get a break from planting all those Sentry Wards. ^_^

@MurphGuitar: Zal recommends AMAI installation on freshly copied maps. I forgot the reason why, but it does feel neat to do that.

@AMAI Team:
1. Because the initial lag is gone, we can do away with my previous "Tip of the Day" display before the lag happens.

2. Will the towering algorithm benefit from "Is Terrain Pathable"?

@thenonhacker

I was having a look at that and could improve it with the new functions, but they dont have really much effect on the function as it is. All i can do is possibly more accurately find the front posistions.

EDIT - I have recently noticed a strange lag issue been caused by the tower code and at present not able to find the cause. I will be fixing that first before any improvements are made.

Actualy not when there is new war3 version but when there is new AMAI version since installing AMAI again to same map (overwriting previous files there) increases the filesize of the map. It doesn't matter really but if you install AMAI on same map over and over again about 50 times war3 might say the map filesize is to big and refuse to start with your 5MB map. also doing that to about 40 maps will take up a lot of HD space.

But use the simple edition for best compatibility since there is no need to install on any map then, however I have no idea if thoes .exe files need to be updated to work with 1.18.

@Zal
The amai exe files do not need updating and work fine as far as i know with the new version.

@Zal: Thanks for the info, yes, I now remember that the maps increase in size.

I always copy maps and reinstall AMAI whenever there's a new AMAI release (changes in AI code) or new Warcraft patch (changes in maps).

I hope a brand new AMAI version will be coming out... and have better a.i! GOGO amai!

Hi AMAI Team! How are things going? Any news on AMAI? Really excited about it! :) Give us upcoming features at the least! ^_^

we are so extremly close to release. Well we would of released about a week ago if it wasn't for the new bugs that occured.

As far as reducing the lag goes, I just had a random thought.

It's been awhile since I coded any JASS, so I can't remember if the map file name is visible to it, but in any case you could generate some unique name based on what you know about the map in JASS. All that's important is that it generate the same name for the same map everytime.

Once you figure out the pathing, store the result in the game cache. Then when the player plays the map again use the copy from the cache so their won't be any lag. It's possible that the map may have changed since the cache though, so you could pick some random points and see if the pathing is the same, or the AMAI install could insert a timestamp into a variable for when it was injected, and this could be part of the file identifier (since when there's a map change you're going to want to reinject anyway). This way you'd only experience the lag once per map per AMAI version. Assuming of course the new common.j makes this unnecessary.

Heh, random thought browsing these forums late at night after being away for so long :) Hopefully I'm not too outdated.

I believe 1.18 introduces functions that AMAI is using, that allow it to do exactly what it does now but without the lag.

Quitch is correct, the lag is gone now, just have to get araound to really be happy with how this version performs, had some serious bugs I discovred just before I was about to release don't want that to happen again.