First of All...

Mike, Mattress... Thank you So Much for working on Supremacy. Ive been waiting about 10 years since BOTF for a Sequel. Im thankfull its in the hands of devoted Trek Fans. You guys deserve a medal or nobel peace prize.

The only thing Im standing by for on Supremacy is The AI. I can live without the tactical battles... would love to have it but I can play the game without it. I was wondering how far along is the AI? Can it be our Christmas Present?

If you guys need help with it... Im planning on taking some C# classes soon ... and could help once I mastered the language.

I was wondering to what extent there is collaboration between the BotE team and Supremacy development?
I seem to recall reading that the BotE code was going to become open source (assume that this means anyone has access to it). If this is the case and I'm not dreaming it all up surly the development of the AI could be dramatically increased by using BotE's AI as a base line starting point.
I know the 2 games have many differences but presumably the AI's won't be too different???
Not being a programmer myself I don't know if what I'm suggesting is workable or utter nonsense, you decide

well the source is kind-of-open, i.e. if you want to contribute code-wise you get the link. and mike said he could possibly do that, so ...

Hey Jean, long time now see!

If you're looking for work, could you have a look at the download links on the Supremacy website? We've had some complaints that the .Net download links are out of date. Supremacy needs .Net 3.5 SP1 now. Mike is going to be releasing a game update soon as well (I finally finished my buildings and minor races update ) so you might want to grab the download link for the updated game version once he releases it too.

Sadly, no, the AI is still all in the theoretical stage at the moment. I do have some code written, but I'm probably going to scrap all of it and start over. I have this annoying tendency to be overly thorough, which means when I try to come up with AI algorithms, I keep wanting to make them too complicated. I have a hard time deciding what's okay to approximate. The other issue is time--unlike most other parts of the game, AI isn't something I can just sit and work on for a couple hours whenever I have some free time. I really need long stretches of uninterrupted time so I can get myself back in focus and thoroughly explore the problems.

On the upside, I had some cool ideas at work this week for how the Colony AI can determine what to build, and I'm going to work on it this weekend .

I don't exactly know how many hours per day SirP worked on the AI but he managed to do it from scratch in 4 months. But I think he really worked a lot of if not all hours on weekend at it.

No Jean, BOTE and Supremacy are written in completely different programming languages, and they are completely different games. Some of the concepts might be interchangeable, but the code itself would still need to be rewritten in the language that Supremacy uses, and even then it would still need to be tailored to the game, so Mike might be better off making his own code anyways.

The best way to think of it is like translating one language directly into another via a dictionary without having any real knowledge of the other language. The words might be right, but that doesn't mean the sentence structure or grammar is correct. Without getting those correct, what you've written might make as much sense to a computer as gobbledygook - which they're even worse than humans at understanding.

Aside from that, I like to see his cool ideas also .