Poiuy, we come to you with a behemoth request! We need you to develop a streamlined PyAI compiler of sorts that compiles a designated aiscript.bin from lists of scripts held within designated folders. ... Yes, I know, PyAI already does that and you're probably confused right now as to what the hell this is about?
What we're proposing is a smaller and simpler separate stand alone program specifically designed to inject various AI's into Starcraft. No opening of scripts, no exporting, no save buttons, no editor, no external defs, no tbl or mpq management, etc. Tho a button to launch PyAI proper should be included. Scripts will be placed/stored into separate folders as Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. Much like the palette files in PyGrp, these scripts will then display in their appropriate window/column in the gui. A 4th window would then display the various titles of these scripts chosen from each window/folder. Finally a launch button would compile the scripts, inject this compiled aiscript.bin into a designated sempq (BWAI.exe) and launch said sempq. OR perhaps the program would close and launch a 2nd program that would automatically do this (inject the compiled script and launch).
I know I have come to you about this before, and the auto-launching injecting part seemed a bit out of your scope. This was before your extensive language studies such as C++ and I believe this is totally within reason now. I can, as you have seen with BWAIDowngrader etc, write a simple program that can take a file and archive it into an .mpq using Blizzard's own installer (which happens to support the .mpq structure) and I suppose something like this could be used, but an all-in-one program would be really slick.
The compiler itself would of course spit out any error messages for "bad" scripts, but the intended purpose is for this to be a launcher not an editor/tool. The scripts that are in this folder are 100% complying/working scripts.
Now, users can play any AI they want! Want to play Racine3.0T with AsharaP and Mesk's Zons? ... just select the 3 from each window and hit "play".. It's that simple. Wanna see how 3 non-cheating AI's fare against Zbath? Maybe want to play an older version of AhzzAi? It's all here because .txt files don't take up any space at all. Most importantly the ai is "built" by the user rather than pre-compiled.
This is a quick mock up of a GUI. Obviously "frame" stands for scripts.
What this will allow is for the non-modding community to be able to play around with all sorts of combinations without having to import, save, and then use winmpq or Mpqdraft etc. All these chores alienate the general non-modding audience. Additionally, modders can now supply .txt files for their AI rather than compiled .exes. Each .txt will file will be placed in the proper folder (Terran, Toss, Zerg). Best of all, this is a way to include EVERYTHING we have ever done at BWAI.com into one big simple package. Every script produced over the last 5 years will be playable with just a few clicks!
BWAI3.1 was good, and BWAI Gold was fun as well. BWAI Launcher would be everything those 2 programs fell short of and more as well as a great way to preserve what we've done here.
So where to begin?
EDIT: Damn forgot to mention something that came to me on the golf course today.. ENTROPYZE! A special button that will randomly pick one script from each race! If possible?..
BWAI Launcher Support/Bug Report
If possible?..
