Game Reaction Engine - Introduction

Game play is a vital part of any game. Game Reaction Engine (GRE) is a logical brain, the chief of making reactive decisions based on an action. An action leads to a reaction, a reaction can lead to a chain reaction. GRE can be used on many types of game genres, from war games to evolving puzzles. Limited only by logic.

Two examples of use:

Scenario #1

Action
You are a player in a military style game, your objective is to destroy a checkpoint. You set your explosive charges, they go off, the checkpoint is destroyed.

Reaction
Because you have destroyed the checkpoint, a helicopter (AI) is sent out to the location co-ordinates of the checkpoint to investigate. As they are enemy AI your presence is detected within a certain radius before launching missiles at you, and unfortunately killing you.

Chain Reaction
As you have been killed by the enemy AI, 3 heavily armed friendly helicopters are sent to the location that you died to seek out and destroy any enemy AI or players in the radius.

In addition to that:

3 x Enemy Helicopter Reinforcements are also deployed.
2 x Enemy Tank Reinforcements are also deployed.
3 x Friendly AI Gunships are sent to the area.
2 x Friendly AI Sub-marines are sent to the area.

Scenario #2

Action

You have 2 possible exits in your skill based puzzle game, based on your first action will determine the path taken to get out of the game alive. You choose door number 2.

Reaction

After choosing door number 2, you are teleported to a level that requires a large amount of skill, but you manage to complete it without failure. You have the choice of choosing from 2 more doors.

Action

You chose door number 2. You are teleported to a level that required you to move fast.

Reaction

The task set is virtually impossible and you fail it. You are then teleported back to your original location, you can choose the same path but then depending on how GRE has been setup, it may give you the same path, or a completely random one - so no two paths are the same.

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You can create single or grouped reactions with the option to randomize one or more scenarios. Making reaction outcomes different every time.

GRE can take your game play to a higher level, used with GSE (Game State Engine) to destroy and repair buildings and objects will make your game play even more complete.

GRE will initially be available for Torque 3D. It can be used for multi-player, and single player games where an internet connection is present. The number of multi-player servers and players it can manage on one GRE server greatly depends on how many actions/reactions/chain-reactions there are and the specification of your server. Running several of our products all from one server may not be wise, ideally you should keep the game server separate from your registrations/login authentication and running GSE and GRE on seperate vps/dedicated servers in a production environment. Although testing can all be done from one development box.

So far, benchmark testing has been made with 3 real players, 3 actions, 3 reactions and 9 chain-reactions without any performance issues. Further testing has yet to be done to benchmark its capabilities and we will require some BETA testers for this, nearer the time. There's still a bit of work to be done, including the ability to speed up or slow down reaction times on servers with high load, but then this could reduce accuracy for AI that only seek and destroy within a small radius, but ideal if you want to just send out patrols that then scout around looking for targets.

Next on the list is AI based players to start their own war-games scenario, so in fact you could have two teams of AI players battling it out without any player interaction, or at least you could set target points for the AI and see how each scenario pans out.

More development information and videos in the next blog update. GRE will be available sometime after GSE has launched.