Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is a subject so vast that we will barely scratch the surface.
AI in Video
Games
is usually heavily simplified and therefore easier to implement.
There is this wonderful series of articles called
Designing Artificial Intelligence for Games
that I highly recommend reading to get a feeling how game AI should be done. We will be
continuing our work on top of what we already have, example code for this chapter will be
in
08-ai
.
Designing AI Using Finite State Machine
Non player tanks in our game will be lone rangers, hunting everything that moves while
trying to survive. We will use
Finite State Machine
to implement tank behavior.
First, we need to think “what would a tank do?” How about this scenario:
1.
Tank wanders around, minding it's own business.
2.
Tank encounters another tank. It then starts doing evasive moves and tries hitting
the enemy.
3.
Enemy took some damage and started driving away. Tank starts chasing the enemy
trying to finish it.
4.
Another tank appears and fires a couple of accurate shots, dealing serious damage.
Our tank starts running away, because if it kept receiving damage at such rate, it
would die very soon.
5.
Tank keeps fleeing and looking for safety until it gets cornered or the opponent
looks damaged too. Then tank goes into it's final battle.
We can now draw a Finite State Machine using this scenario:
