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

2D animation versus 3D animation


Video game animation can be put into two genres, 2D and 3D animation. Both have distinct features, and we need to take that into consideration and use them to our advantage when developing a game. Let's take a look at some of the main differences between the two.

2D animation - sprites

As soon as consoles and computers allowed developers to integrate animation into the video games that they were making, games became much richer, relying on good-looking visuals to express the movement and actions of the characters. It also opened many doors to create new game genres or update older genres, making them more appealing, and since then, almost every game has started to implement animations.

The process of 2D animation used on video games is similar to what Disney use to use create their movies. They would draw and paint every frame of the movie, and every second would have around 12 frames. Games couldn't use real-life drawings at the time, but they could use coordinates...