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

Simple versus advanced pathfinding


As we discovered in the previous chapter, pathfinding is used by AI characters to discover the direction that they need to move and how to do it correctly. Depending on the game that we are working on, we could use a simple pathfinding system or a complex one. Both can be very useful. There are situations where a simple pathfinding system is enough to accomplish the task that we are looking for, but in other cases we need a different alternative to the methods that we have covered before in order to achieve the complexity and realism that is necessary for our AI character.

Before talking about any advanced system of creating a pathfinding method, let's discover why we need to use it and in what circumstances it is necessary to update our character and make it more intelligent and aware. Using our previous examples, we will be looking at the limitations that exist for a normal pathfinding method. Understanding the limitations of a simple pathfinding system...