Chapter 1: Fundamental AI Technologies : 1 Context
"I not only use all the brains that i have, but all that i can borrow."
- Woodrow Wilson
An interesting artificial intelligence system is a major component of any successful game.
AI makes games challenging and addictive, and thus generates a large portion of the gameplay value.
AI is a science with more that 50 years of history, this means that there are very well known methods
that cover a wide range of scenarios and goals. in this chapter we will examine some of these methods
and see how we can apply them to accomplish our goals and needs.
Some person, "I have a black belt in karate"
Dad, "Yea well I have a fan belt in street fighting"
Chapter 1: Fundamental AI Technologies [1.1.1 Sensing the World]
All AI systems need to be aware of their surroundings so they can use that information in the reasoning/analysis phase.
What they sense and how much depends on the type of game you are making.
lets look at one example, lets say quake. any individual enemy needs to know:
- where the player is and where he is looking
- what the geometry of the surroundings are
- and sometimes what weapon its using and what weapon the player is using.
lets look at another example, lets say age of empires or generally any RTS
- what is the balance of power in each sub area of the map.
- how much of each resources do i have
- what is the breakdown of unit types : infantry. cavalry, and so on/
- what is my status in terms of the technology tree.
- what is the geometry of the game world.
note : a major part of ai consist of path finding, thats why we always have to be aware of the world geometry.
Some person, "I have a black belt in karate"
Dad, "Yea well I have a fan belt in street fighting"
sorting AI data is often complex because the concepts beign stored are not staight forward.
in an individual level AI, this weill be less of a problem. we can store pointes and orientations and use numeric values to depict the state the Ai is in. if the character is walking; the state equals one; if he is tunning, the state equals 2, and so on.
now, how do we store abstract information.
to be continued... gotta run.
Some person, "I have a black belt in karate"
Dad, "Yea well I have a fan belt in street fighting"
Awesome, I haven't had much time to dig into A.I., I can't wait to read this. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.
MarauderIIC wrote:You know those people that are like "CHECK IT OUT I just made Linux run on this piece of celery [or other random object]!!"? Yeah, that's Falco, but with ES.
Dear god, they actually ported ES to a piece of celery!
Martin Golding wrote:
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
