Starcraft AI blog

I’m accomplishing things slowly for now, but that doesn’t stop me from laying plans—or rethinking my past plans. Rather than working hard, I’ve been adding new openings, including a couple that are quite different in idea from anything else in Steamhammer’s repertoire. New openings don’t help in the short run (they mainly make it harder to find the right opening), but I am looking ahead.

Anyway, given my slow progress and the decision to participate in AIST S2, here’s my changed plan for the near future (it should be stable at least until tomorrow). Rather than get Steamhammer 2.2 out at the end of SSCAIT, which I missed by a mile, I’ll release it after AIST S2 submission at the end of this month. Or possibly I’ll skip 2.2 and release 2.2.1 slightly later, because I’m again concentrating on zerg for the tournament and there may be fixes needed for terran and protoss. With people worried about shallow forks, I’m thinking about releasing source less often anyway.

As far as visible play changes goes, the tournament version has bug fixes, including a fix for the debilitating command jam bug that makes macro games ugly. And it has the usual fleet of minor improvements, and a couple which are not as minor. For a tournament I have to bring something more, so I’m aiming to add at least one strong and unexpected tactical feature. I have a shortlist.

In AIST S1 I lost a lot of time coping with the map Sparkle, and other maps caused trouble too. I’m not expecting difficulties in this edition. So far, I haven’t run into problems with any of the AIST S2 maps (well, not beyond the usual). I will run a lot more tests, but so far so good. Not that my expectations are particularly accurate, but I expect to be ready in good time.

Next: Longer range plans.