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

Video games and crowd interactions


As we have discovered before, crowd interactions are a real-life matter, but it can be found in video games, especially those that relies on human-like aspects. Because of the popularity of open-world maps, crowd interactions became a very important aspect when developing the game, because the AI agents of the game are constantly sharing the same space. This means that almost every open world game has the necessity to plan a crowd interaction system.

Assassin's Creed

A very popular case of crowd interaction system on a video game can be found in the Assassin's Creed series. The non-playable characters walk around the map in groups, and in a simple way they avoid collisions and interact with the environment. This helps create a realistic atmosphere to the game, a crucial point that can make the game believable and submerging the player into a virtual world:

Not only can we see group interaction in the general population of the game, but also in the guards and...