AI Documentation

When you buy The Universal AI Starter Kit, you get more than just the code itself; you get a lot of good documentation which can significantly increase your ability to use the kit and will therefore allow you to have better, more customized AI experiences in your game.

You may not know this, but writing good documentation is hard. As a rough estimate, I spend about one third of my time doing initial programming, one third testing, bug hunting and fixing, and one third writing documentation. In fact, the initial programming probably takes up less than a third of my total development time and the rest of it is spent improving that programming in various ways. I like to keep things as polished as I can for you guys.

There's API and general use documentation, installation instructions for 3 different engines (remember that the kit works with TGE, TGEA & T3D), tutorials (including this video tutorial), change logs, FAQs, GUI text and tooltips, code comments and good naming practices for everything in the script. That's a lot of writing, and it takes a lot of work to keep everything up to date. Of course all of this is done for the benefit of the end user. I think a product that lacks documentation is unprofessional and almost useless for a large number of people. I know I wouldn't want to buy a piece of development software that didn't spend months on testing and documentation, so I make sure to put in as much time and effort as they require. Like all of my updates, I will NOT ship a release without full and complete documentation and testing, period. And this release has more documentation than ever!

Now at this point, you may be thinking "but with so much documentation, I feel overwhelmed." Well I've got you covered. How? With even more documentation! The brand new "Getting Started Guide" will help you to gradually become familiar with The UAISK until you're using it like a pro. It's designed to make getting started a very easy, stress free process and helps you to ease into working with the kit.

Update 1.4 also comes with multiple tutorials. Here's a brief list of what's included in these tutorials.

Pet Tutorial:

• Bind a key to spawn a pet near the player.
• Limit the number of pets the player can spawn.
• Have the pets die after a certain period of time.

Team Tutorial:

• Adding in the team selection GUI, a key binding to open it, and a message that will be sent when leaving or joining a team.
• Code to automatically open the team selection GUI on load and open the player list when a game is over.
• Different colored text on the player list; the color is determined by what team the player is on.
• Team based spawn points for players.
• The ability for the game to keep track of the bot's kills, deaths and scores.
• Adding a team based win condition.

Not only do these tutorials provide you with these features, but more importantly, they help to teach you about what each piece of code does; and this will allow you to more easily apply that knowledge to your own custom coding ideas.

I'd like to stress that that the primary function of the tutorials is that of a learning tool. The kit is very flexible and now more modular than ever. But to get the most out of it, you must know how to use it. The more customized and unique that you want your game's AI to be; the more important it is to learn as much as you can. I should mention that the tutorials aren't perfect, and there are a few things about them that I'd like to improve, but I think that they serve their purpose.

In addition, all of the preexisting documents have also received updates to match everything that was added or changed in version 1.4 (and this was a big update!). Of course, that part is nothing new because I do that for every update. I try very hard to keep everything as up to date as possible and I redo a great deal of the documentation for each update in order to keep it relevant and user friendly.

I've also tried my best to provide great support for users of the kit and I'd argue that The UAISK's private forum on this site, is one of the most active and helpful of any of the add on forums. There's a lot of smart people on there, doing a lot of interesting things and trying to expand the usage of the kit in different ways!

Video games are all different and therefore have different AI needs. If you have an original game idea, there is a good chance that no AI pack will include every feature that you need right out of the gate (if it did, your game idea wouldn't be original). The main goal of this kit is to give you a very strong starting place, a foundation upon which you can build to create your own specific game's AI. The kit provides you with a lot of cool features and behaviors which are used in multiple types of games. This way you don't have to waste your time coding all of the basic things that your AI will need and you are able to simply modify or build upon these standards to create your own custom gaming experiences. This is the reason why I put so much work into the documentation; it can make it much easier for you to take these standard gaming essentials and customize them to your own game's unique needs.

This is the last blog in our four part 1.4 update series, links to the three previous blogs are listed below. I hope that you've learned a little bit more about The Universal AI Starter Kit and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!




Update Blog #1 - Huge Update!
Update Blog #2 - New Behaviors!
Update Blog #3 - AI to the Rescue!
Update Blog #4 - AI Documentation