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

Smooth transitions


Another important aspect that is worth mentioning is the smooth transition between animations. It is very important to maintain the integrity of the animations, so that every action performed by the character looks fluid, helping the virtual immersion of the player.

On this subject, 2D and 3D animations have considerable differences. If we are using 2D sprites, we need to draw the necessary frames that will be used for every transition, and every time we want the character to change from one animation to another, the transition animation will be played.

On the other hand, with 3D characters we can use the bone structure to create the transitions automatically, where the coordinates for each bone will move from the previous animation to the new one. Even if we choose to use the bone structure to help create the transitions, sometimes it might be necessary, or it would be a better option, to manually create new animations that will be used as transitions. This is a common...