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

Planning crowd interactions


Sometimes we put aside the planning phase while creating a game and think that all we need to create an awesome game is to have an idea and everything will flow smoothly from our head. Successful games are successful because every step of the development is planned to the smallest detail, and we should remember that when creating our own games. At this point, we have a strong technical knowledge to develop a challenging and interesting game with plenty of AI features in it, so our next step is to combine the ability to create games with a plan to make them look better.

Now that we've analyzed some popular examples of crowd interaction systems in video games, we can take a look at how to plan these types of interaction. We will follow the examples from before and see how we can plan similar crowd interaction into our games.

Group fight

Let's create a scenario where we have multiple AI characters fighting the player. We start by implementing the combat features into...