

Perfectstorm: RTS written in Common Lisp using OpenGL - chaostheory
http://erleuchtet.org/2008/03/project-overview-perfectstorm.html

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henning
Being able to work in Lisp instead of C++ is a big win, but always remember
all the user will care about is whether it's fun or not and not what language
it's implemented in.

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ken
The primary user seems to be the author, who wrote it to learn about game AI.
And a game that doesn't get written is no fun at all.

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jsmcgd
Wow. RTS and CL. Two of my favorite things. Any chance of a video
demonstration?

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mdaines
I really like the pathfinding screenshot!

I wish there were more games that exposed their internal operation or made it
part of the gameplay. It seems like many hacker news readers would enjoy a
game in which you assemble an AI in competition with other AIs -- what I'd
like is a game that allowed you to do that with varying levels of abstraction.
A nice API for an RTS engine would make that possible, I guess.

And, on a tangent: it'd be cool if more games responded to the way people
"cheat" at computer games, like if there was a game that made saving and
restoring state an actual part of the gameplay...

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wmf
Yes, sometimes when I'm playing a game I'll come up with an algorithm to
handle some aspect of it (e.g. adjusting the tax rate), but the game doesn't
allow scripting so I have to run the algorithm by hand.

Also, check out Bolo and the many bots available for it (if you can find a way
to run it - maybe someone should clone it in Flash).

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JMiao
This is fantastic. RTS game design is antiquated and severely bloated
(partially from developer laziness and publishers not wanting to invest money
into the genre since it's relatively niche and not a big seller on consoles).

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cousin_it
Yep. I see Flash games as the only chance for the industry. There's no chance
a fantastic game like N <http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html> could go
through today's major publishing channels. Big games of today are just more
artists, more polygons, more levels. Nobody's going to make the next LOOM
<http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/loom.htm> except Flash devs.

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abossy
Games won't be able to compete on art and graphics for long. Look at Crysis--
it's nearly photorealistic. Once the curve of graphics improvement reaches its
asymptote, developers will have to start innovating on gameplay.

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DmitriLebedev
Nice to hear of a work on a smart AI.

I've had the same ideas, that the situation with AI or any scientific tools in
the gaming mainstream is unsatisfactory. I had to deal a lot with AI air
traffic control in MSFS2004 and it was noteable that they abandoned it's
development as soon as it was able to do all the chain of basic operations
from taxiing and takeoff to approach and vacating the runway. The real-life
ATC are always sloving an optimisation problem, which is the most crucial at
approach. Of course, AI ATC doesn't care to optimize anything and may make a
poor a/c go around forever.

One problem with AI is that it can't be estimated quickly by game reviewers.
It takes much time to notice it's patterns, probably it takes to complete all
the missions up to the end. As a result, AI quality doesn't affect game's
grades much enough to care about it.

Another thing is that many game developers are good at algorythms and
programming, but not (if at all) at game theory, and social math theories
(like evolutionary dynamics), and optimal control.

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GavinB
This looks like it could be great -- it breaks it down to gameplay without
fancy 3d engines.

You should put an email signup on the site so that people who want to play the
game when it's really playable can keep it in mind. Otherwise we might not
remember the web address.

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dplabs
very nice.

quick question. why clos? and why not more macros? i like what you did in
defdrawmethod -- do more of that, less clos :)

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rpdillon
> For graphics, i first tested SDL which turned out not to be hardware-
> acceleratable under X11.

Wait, what?

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sohail
He was meaning 2d graphics

