Book Image

Practical Game AI Programming

By : Micael DaGraça
Book Image

Practical Game AI Programming

By: Micael DaGraça

Overview of this book

The book starts with the basics examples of AI for different game genres and directly jumps into defining the probabilities and possibilities of the AI character to determine character movement. Next, you’ll learn how AI characters should behave within the environment created. Moving on, you’ll explore how to work with animations. You’ll also plan and create pruning strategies, and create Theta algorithms to find short and realistic looking game paths. Next, you’ll learn how the AI should behave when there is a lot of characters in the same scene. You'll explore which methods and algorithms, such as possibility maps, Forward Chaining Plan, Rete Algorithm, Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, and Map Preprocess Implementation should be used on different occasions. You’ll discover how to overcome some limitations, and how to deliver a better experience to the player. By the end of the book, you think differently about AI.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
6
Navigation Behavior and Pathfinding
9
AI Planning and Collision Avoidance

Utility-based functions


Now that we know how to calculate chance and use AFSMs, it's time to explore them a little more and make our characters look smart. This time, we'll use an AI character that is set to behave autonomously in a simulation game such as The Sims. This is a perfect environment to test artificial intelligence because it mimics real-life needs and choices.

In the video game The Sims, the player has the opportunity to control a human-like character and the main goal of the game is to make sure that the character is always in good situations and that their personal and professional life is always on a positive note. Meanwhile, time goes by, just like in real life, and the character gets older until he finally dies at the end. The player is responsible for the life of that being but if the player doesn't give any orders to the character, he will react autonomously to fulfill his needs. It was revolutionary the way that an AI character could behave in a video game; people could...