Advanced animation and sound management

Advanced animation and sound management of Guide Bot's EnhancedPlayer class allows to configure visual appearance of various types of game characters solely from scripts without need to modify or recompile C++ sources.

GI-Soldier Bot includes enhanced animations set for running, walking, crouching, crawling, strafing, shooting from machine-gun and throwing of grenades.

Actions and effectors

Flexible and expandable architecture of Guide Bot is based on intellectual autonomous agent's theory. Actor is AI controlled entity. Each actor consists of effectors - arms, legs, head, mouth etc. Action is a sub-program that can be assigned on the one or several effectors. For example action “walk” for the effector “legs”, actions “punch” or “shoot” for the effector “arms”, action “talk” for the effector “mouth”, action “jump” for the effectors “legs” and “arms” etc.

High-level actions are the actions that execute simpler (low-level) actions to create more complex behavioral patterns like: fighting enemy with different types of weapon (melee or distant), chasing or fleeing the enemy, paroling territory, wandering around.

Custom actions for user-defined behaviors can be added either from scripts or C++.

Perception and awareness system

Perception system makes bot's behavior more natural and challenging. Bots can hear and thus react to sounds accordingly. Each sound that bot hears has parameters that affect bot's awareness level. For example sound of steps urges bot to look around. While sounds of shooting or explosions signals the start of the fight.

Combat system and dynamic covers

Guide Bot's characters can be easily configured to use different type of weapons, including weapon of melee combat and grenades.

So-called “Attack Infos” describe what attacks can be used by bot during the fight. Term “attack” refers to the complex behavior and is specified by numerous parameters like distance of attack, type of weapon used, manoeuvrings settings etc.

Additional fighting abilities include usage of dynamic and physics objects as covers and algorithms of evasion from grenades and explosions.

Teams

Each bot can be the member of one of the teams. Teams has enemy-neutral-friend relation defined between them. Player's character also can be assigned to the team. Thus there can be groups of bots friendly or hostile to the player.

Steering and dynamic obstacle avoidance.

Guide Bot uses simple but effective system of local pathfinding based on steering algorithms. Such kind of pathfinding allows bot to avoid obstacles including dynamic ones (like various physics items).

GI-Soldier Bot Demo

GI-Soldier Bot is an example of Guide Bot functionality and can be used as a starting point for learning main principles of AI architecture and algorithms behind Guide Bot.

GI-Soldier Bot can do following:

• Guards some territory using predefined path of waypoints;
• When bot hears some suspicion sounds it will look around to see the source of the sound; when see the enemy bot will abandon patrolling and start fighting the enemy; when fighting bot will use covers, avoid grenades and exposing barrels.
• Fights enemy with machine-gun and grenades.

All sources of GI-Soldier Bot including models of soldier, weapons and animations in 3dsMax format are included in the package.

Torque 3D:

Windows XP, Vista, 7
Intel or AMD Processor @ 1 Ghz
256 MB RAM (1GB recommended for Vista)
100% DirectX compatible ATI or nVidia based video card with 128 video RAM
DirectX

OSX 10.5.6
Intel-based Macs only
2 GB RAM
ATI or nVidia shader model 2.0+ video cards with 256 MB video RAM required

Guide-Bot_EULA.pdf