Prev/Next Blog
by date

Plan for Mike Nelson

Name:	Mike Nelson
Date Posted:	Aug 05, 2002
Rating:	Not Rated
Public:	YES
Comments:	YES
RSS Feed:	or Subscribe with .
Profile Page:	View profile page for Mike Nelson

Blog post

The search for lightweight bots

I’m working on finding a way to minimize the overhead on the AI bot connections. In Myrmidon we have many enemy bots running around and it seems to eat up resources fast. Even when they are idling there seems to be a lot of processing going on.

My initial idea was to create a separate non-connection type AI since this seems to be where the overhead is. Maybe turn them into ghost objects. But I’m sure that that would produce warping and all kinds of other network anomalies in regards to the movement of the bots.

Another idea is to customize the network scoping of the AI bots. Maybe not sending updates of bot information when players are out of visual range of the bots might help.

Still digging…

Any suggestions or ideas?

Recent Blog Posts

List:	07/11/04 - Plan for Mike Nelson 04/29/04 - Plan for Mike Nelson 08/05/02 - Plan for Mike Nelson 05/06/02 - Plan for Mike Nelson 03/24/02 - Plan for Mike Nelson 03/09/02 - Plan for Mike Nelson 02/27/02 - Plan for Mike Nelson 02/06/02 - Plan for Mike Nelson

Submit your own resources!

Jeremy Noetzelman (Aug 05, 2002 at 20:04 GMT)

Phil is/was planning on adding FEAR (an AI API) hooks into ShapeBase. I've also done something similar, but using a custom protocol.

The problem you're experiencing is that the AIConnection is really a heavy duty player. It does the same stuff as a player, but has the AI hooks.

Ideally, you don't want your AI to be like a player, since you don't need network capabilities and such. By putting it into ShapeBase you give 'AI' capabilities to any of it's derivatives. This is fun, because then you can have trees and whatnot that have AI, if that was something that would be amusing to you ... or more realistically ... pole mounted cameras that react according to basic AI hooks.

Make sense?

Mike Nelson (Aug 05, 2002 at 22:24 GMT)

Jeremy,

Thanks for the input. Totally makes sense. Have you tried doing this before? and if so have there been any oddities that occurred from doing it?

Thanks,
Mike

Jeremy Noetzelman (Aug 06, 2002 at 19:50 GMT)

I've done it, yes.

There's the normal gotchas you have when subclassing ShapeBase and it's derivatives in TGE, but nothing major.

Mike Nelson (Aug 07, 2002 at 16:21 GMT)

Jeremy,

Could you indulge me a little and give me a small overview on how you accomplished this? I'm still trying to figure out what direction to go to do this.

Thanks,
Mike

You must be a member and be logged in to either append comments or rate this resource.