Programming

Hey there! I know this is my second Application, but hear me out. I've been learning Lua over the past year, and ive finally culminated enough knowledge to do something! I plan on taking this up in my free time, on a regular basis(kinda like moopli or crovea) and i need to know were to start. I dont know c++, so i cant do any engine work. I can, however, do any scripting/GUI(since i also know XML), and i can do website and wiki design.

Sweet!

So for starters, you'll need to clone the repo. Are you familiar with git? Then you have to get a working development version able to build and run; so once you've cloned the repo we'll work with you to get it compiling. Assuming you're on windows, you can download TortoiseGit and follow some tutorial to get the repo cloned. While you're cloning, I suggest you wander around our GitHub project a bit, read docs/quicktips.md, skim through the easy issue list, read a beginner's guide on GitHub, etc.

As always, if you have any questions or whatever, we can answer and help (or try, anyway :P).

Gits not familiar, but ill try. I also have one question. I know this is far off, but do you guys have any clue how youll actually handle the behaviour editor(GUI wise, Gameplay wise, etc. etc.)? The thought confuses me and i need some clearing up on this

We haven't thought about the Behaviour Editor (BE) in a long time, and I don't think there's ever been a serious discussion about the minutiae of implementation. Luckily, I'm currently bored, so I'll just write down some assorted thoughts:

It seems settled that the BE will allow you to program simple triggers -- each of them linking up a triggering action, some additional required conditions, and a series of response actions. Since the in-game BE is one of those things we would not want to write unless we have to (after all, it's loads of work to give people a GUI to do a subset of the things that they could write scripts to do), it will have to be possible to tweak behaviour by writing scripts.

Triggers alone are only enough for reflex-like actions, so we'll have to allow the AI some mutable state -- probably in the form of a finite-state machine. Have state-checks as conditions, and state-transitions as actions.

Most of the data revolving around behaviour can exist per-species, with only stuff like the current FSM state and current state of trigger execution (like, which trigger an organism is currently running, which action, etc) need to exist per-object.

The trigger scripts will probably be tables, containing a trigger ID, a conditions list, and an actions list; where conditions and actions are functions, all defined in lua, of course, since that makes the system easily extensible. Triggering-actions are a little harder to make easily-extensible -- they'd probably have to refer to specific hooks like "x enters FOV" or "every x seconds", which means the engine has to run each type of trigger at a certain point in its execution cycle -- which is annoying to automate/generalize.

I might not have been talking about the sort of thing you want to know, come to think of it. Let me know, I guess.

No, no, your doing ok. You answered most of my questions. In terms of implementation, we could think of it like the ai creator in From The Depths. Sliders might not be the most realistic way to implement this, but its easy and effective. Using from the depths as an example again, when youre creating a AI boat you can implement differing modules depending on the tpe of behavior you want it to have. Maybe we could have a sort of grid of list were you could add modules, like an if then module or a for x to happen y must happen. Thinking on the suggestions of people in the past, we could categorize different types, like food, or liquids to make a statement ex. If organism has 42 molecules of CO2 then expel 42 CO2 and make a number list for other organisms, depending on their threat level, with prey having a positive level and predators having a negative one.

Maybe caste could be used as a group? Like queen ants staying in colony and workers bring food?

Maybe

Ok, so ive finally got this repo cloned, how shall i compile?

Good to hear from you again!

Try following these instructions to compile thrive:
https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/blob/master/mingw_setup/readme.txt

It'll take you through compiling the C++ code, but you won't need to know any C++ to do it!

If you have need any help, naturally feel free to ask here, on skype (you already added me) or thrivegame.slack.com

Another thing I recommend is being able to understand some basic C++ header files. Since the lua code calls functions in the C++ engine, it is useful to be able to see what functions are made available in C++, although for most things there will be other lua examples you can look at!

Thanks! I really want to see this project grow, and if that means i have to help myself, so be it

Ive seemed to have thrown myself into a pickle. Cmake refuses to work, as project files are invalid?