AI build

Circuit AI. Give details about your crash. Maybe you built the wrong one for the wrong engine.

I could never get Java AIs working on Windows. Your best bet would still probably be either Lua (with Shard) or C++, I've built spring before (on MSVC x64 + VCPKG, which required some significant changes the cmakelists, and to streflop but that's another story...) and contributed to the engine (only a tiny bit though, like 2 years ago) so I know a little bit about the build process, but not much about the AI interfaces.

Shard isn't broken. It's not an AI. It's an AI _framework_. See 'AI/Skirmish/Shard/README.md' in the source files for details. From what I can see using Shard (you already know how to get it working, from what I can tell) would be the easiest way if you're willing to use Lua.

For C++, in theory, you could do something like this:
* Clone the maintainance branch of Spring off Github
* Make sure it builds
* Work from the 'AI/Skirmish/{YOUR AI NAME HERE}' folder
* Make your own AI using CppTestAI as a template

This way you'll have access to debug builds of both Spring and your AI. Hopefully you'll be able to do stuff like set breakpoints, etc. and develop much faster. As for developing with this process and Zero-K... that part I'm afraid you'll need to figure out yourself. A lot of people have trouble getting the Java AIs working apparently, but if you can get it working it could probably be simpler if you like Java.

sorry if I'm talking a bit out of my depth and misguided you, just want to help. good luck :)

quote: (Why is Shard broken anyway?)

It has not been updated for a long while, it LOS cheats by default, and it requires quite a lot of hoops to jump through to get it to work with ZK, because it assumes a lot of TAisms that ZK dispensed with, cannot place or select a commander by default, etc. It's less broken than incompatible.

quote: ZKGBAI was easy to build but crashed

I guess i'll look into this over the weekend.

You can get the correct engine version by using the checksum.

For 104.0.1-1544-ge1f249f do

git checkout e1f249f

Official engine is built with gcc5.x. From my experience there's an ABI difference between gcc versions. So either you can compile AI with gcc5 and use official engine, or compile AI and own engine version with gccX (X>=5). Engine's commit matters as DF pointed.
"submodule update --init" - pulls CircuitAI (current stable, not bleeding edge testing).
"cmake . && make spring" - builds both engine and all related AIs.

Related: https://springrts.com/wiki/AI:Development:Lang:Cpp

I don't screw around with scope much. My recollection is that each gadget file is its own scope. I avoid having files reference anything from another file that isn't either a return value or inserted in to a global table (usually Spring. or GG.).

I mostly wrote CAI in a week or two around mid 2010. As such the code is pretty bad. I don't recall going back to it and being repelled by the structure, so perhaps the structure is ok. I started working on CAI 2, with features such as pathfinding, and the code for it is still hanging around.

An AI gadget like CAI is just a synced gadget so it runs identically on all computers. The commands are not sent through the network.

_G is a table that can be used to communicate between synced and unsynced luarules. You don't have to worry about Save/Load. It works automatically. No code for it is required in the gadget (or any gadget for that matter).

You can entirely ignore unsynced.