A.I. Wars (The Insect Mind) - BattleShell v1.0.0

A.I. Wars BattleShell allows you to conduct a large scale Cybug war. This is an add-on to A.I. Wars (The Insect mind) v5 registered version and will not work with the shareware version. Download the BattleShell here Download it's source code here Operational Notes When you install this program it is recommended that you not change the default install path. If you do please install BattleShell to a directory path that doesn't contain spaces or periods in directory path names. You may however install it into the same directory as your existing AI Wars program. This add-on takes advantage of the command line options in A.I. Wars to launch its battles. It will use some of the saved display settings in A.I. Wars such as which view mode the battles launch in (FollowCam, BirdsEye or Text mode - 3D will cause problems). Other settings are set in the BattleShell configuration menus.  It is best to change the 2D music settings to off to avoid buffer overflows and system crashes on large scale battles. When A.I. Wars is launched to conduct a battle note that changing view modes will reset the battle. Battles are launched with the Fuel To point bonus setting enabled to give larger armies an instant advantage over smaller ones, but in longer battles this advantage goes away as the Cybugs burn their allotted fuel. The .AIM files are the map files used by the game. You can create your own with any text editor. If you decide to create some maps of your own use the following guidelines: If your map has squares on both the far left and right edges of the map that are on the same or adjacent horizontal planes computer controlled armies can jump across them. Use the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for the 5 terrain types and the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J (note they are upper case) to define where the armies starting position will be. You must have the same number of columns as you do rows, any number will do as long as they are the same. You can switch all armies under computer control if you wish, If you use this feature along with the Save snapshot of battle image after each turn (Snap) option, it would be possible to point a web page with the refresh tag set pointed at the image and allow users to view the battles live! You can point the image background setting to any BMP file, feel free to create and distribute them as well as maps, saved games and custom configuration files as well. This add-on was inspired by the Maneuvers tournament hosted by Devon Ellis in 1998. Devon was the author of 'Mantis2.ai' the first Cybug to strike terror in the hearts of Cybug developers everywhere! Currently Devon is working on a game called AI Fleet Commander.