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Game Project, AI Thoughts

by Paul Scott · 10/09/2002 (5:28 pm) · 10 comments

I've joined a small team working on a torque game, and have been tasked with doing the AI.

AI in Torque is sorely lacking. There is no ai, except what the community has provided so far. There is a phantom AI editor, in example/common, looks like it was used in Tribes. I have not been able to get it to load. It refers to several classes that do not exist. Those classes appear to be the old ai implementation.

I signed on to the project as a programmer, but will probably fill roles of programmer, scripter & level designer, as I work on ai.

I'm trying to stay away from using manual waypoints as much as possible, to lessen the burden on the level designers.

I'm still thinking about terrain visiblily; vis node lists and ai path lists seem very similar to me.

As far as the Altivec stuff goes, that's probly on hold, until I learn how to do it.

#1
10/09/2002 (10:40 pm)
Phil Carlisle was planning to get the FEAR API into Torque for AI, but I don't think there has been much progress yet... maybe you can help putting that in, seems like the best way to go for almost *any* engine... I really like their concept of "self-exploring AI" (if you can summarize it like that...) - check out fear.sourceforge.net and search the GG forums here, there has been quite some discussion...
#2
10/10/2002 (1:49 am)
Fear is GPL ...

-J
#3
10/10/2002 (2:26 am)
So...?
#4
10/10/2002 (3:09 am)
So... read what the license entails...

-J
#5
10/10/2002 (3:28 am)
Actually the FEAR API sounds a bit more powerful than most games need. It sounds expensive to have many AI bots each with their own version of a world path map. From what I've read about FEAR, it seems that bots will not automatically learn what other bots do.
#6
10/10/2002 (4:33 am)
Joshua: so, read what the author of FEAR says about looking forward to integrate it with Torque...
#7
10/10/2002 (5:33 am)
So he will need to change the license...

GPL + GPL is fine... see Quake2

GPL + Torque license is not

I am talking about the license and not the author's excitement

-J
#8
10/10/2002 (6:59 pm)
I looked at FEAR, and I think it really is too heavy for what I'll need. I really need to get something scalable. I need to be able to scale Down the level of intelligence. That's the hard part. Right now, I'm trying to figure out a way to skip the Move calculation, and just use the previous calculation. I see zero need to recalculate such things every update...

Although, I'm still not clear if the getAIMove() is really called every 32ms...
#10
10/12/2002 (12:26 pm)
Well, if he is the orginal author of it I believe he can also release it under a separate license for torque.