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

Navigation behavior


When we talk about navigation behavior, we are referring to the actions of a character that is confronted with a situation where they need to calculate where to go or what to do. A map can have many points where it is necessary to jump or climb stairs in order to arrive at the final destination. The character should know how to use these actions to keep moving correctly; otherwise, he will fall down a hole or keep walking into a wall where he should be climbing some stairs. To avoid that, we need to plan all of the possibilities available for the character while he is moving, making sure that he can jump or perform any other movement necessary to keep moving into the right direction.

Choosing a new direction

One important aspect that the AI character should have is choosing a new direction when he is confronted by an object that is blocking his way and that he cannot pass through. The character should be aware of the objects that are in front of him and, if he cannot keep...