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

Possibility maps


Now let's take a deeper look at the possibility maps that we encountered in the examples in the first chapter, from the chess machine to the Metal Gear Solid video game. As we can see, it's a technique that is still being used today, and it is almost impossible to create a game AI without it.

As the name suggests, possibility maps allow the programmer to define the possibilities available to the player or the AI character within the game. Everything that is possible inside the game needs to be planned and coded, but what happens when you allow the character to do a lot of things can they do them all at the same time? If played during different stages of the game, can they react in the same way at all of the stages? To allow, and restrain, the possible actions, we also need to think about the possible scenarios that can occur in the game, and when you put all of that together it's called a possibility map.

How to use possibility maps

Let's take a look at a simple example of...