trAIns is an AI for OpenTTD (the acronym AI will be adopted to denote a set of algorithms that control an agent in the game). The AI is called trAIns because it only constructs and manages railroad routes - one of the four transport types available in the game. The creation of trAIns has started as a graduation project that after became a research project. It has been written using the Squirrel language and the NoAI API. It can be downloaded and installed automatically using the game mechanism that manages on-line content.

There are two main reasons that explain why railroad routes have been chosen as the only transport type used. First, they have the most complex construction and management process as they incorporate almost all the challenges present in the construction and management of other transport types routes. Second, consequently in our opinion, there were/are few AIs that could/can use trains and generate good results according to the following metric.

A general metric of intelligence for AIs (and the chosen one for this context) is that its actions and decisions must result in behaviors similar to those caused by human players. Therefore, trAIns has been created to provide a competitive and intelligent AI that can play with railroads according to this concept. The following list enumerates the major trAIns features.

Downloads

Features planned for next releases

Images

A railroad route with double railways that transport bubbles.
A junction branching the railroad route.
A railroad route that employs six trains to transport coal.

Release notes

References