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

Advanced environment interactions


As the video game industry and the technology associated with it kept evolving, new gameplay ideas appeared, and rapidly, interaction between the characters of the game and the environment became even more interesting, especially when using physics. This means that the outcome of the environment could be completely random, where it was required for the AI characters to constantly adapt to different situations. One honorable mention on this subject is the video game Worms developed by Team17, where the map can be fully destroyed and the AI characters of the game are able to adapt and maintain smart decisions.

The objective of this game is to destroy the opponent team by killing all their worms, the last man standing wins. From the start, the characters can find some extra health points or ammunition on the map and from time to time, it drops more points from the sky. So, there are two main objectives for the character, namely survive and kill. To survive,...