Shard

Shard is an RTS AI for the spring engine. Based on a mix of C++ and lua, it is the official AI of the game Evolution RTS, and the successor of the NTai project.

I aim to fully document and demonstrate Shard as an API and a framework, and while I do help when asked, and have written extensively in forum threads, I have not had the time to fully document everything proper. I still have changes I have designed which would make subtle but major differences to Shard allowing numerous things that were nit possible before, such as hooks and modules, and this would change the nature if any documentation I write extensively.

Shard nonetheless is a powerful AI with a simple and elegant design. Shard beats all the competition playing numerous games, and it does so by being easy to modify and flexible, not through fancy pathfinding guided by heat and influence maps or predictive algorithms, just plain good old fashioned reliability.

For example, in the game ‘The Cursed’, other AIs fall flat on their faces doing the most basic of operations, usually because a complex logic operation occurs which makes too many assumptions and accounts for possibilities which don’t actually apply or lead to issues and bugs thanks to a lack of an alternative that was never foreseen. Shard does not have these issues, in the event that the logic is flawed however, the design allows for this to be accounted for by overriding the logic with custom logic in the form of overriding lua scripts.

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