Knowledge Representation - Learning Game AI Programming with Lua - page 462

Constructing a soldier blackboard

Previously, we stored any data from evaluators and actions on the userData structure.
We can now move all this data to our blackboard. The following is the list of attribute val-
ues we'll be storing within the blackboard:

Blackboard attributes Description

alive

Whether the agent is considered alive or dead

ammo

The current amount of ammunition the soldier's rifle has left

maxAmmo

The clip size of the soldier's rifle

maxHealth

The starting health of the agent

enemy

The best enemy agent that can be attacked

bestFleePosition The best strategic position to avoid enemy agents

Constructing a blackboard requires you to set the initial attribute values we previously
stored on the soldierUserData table directly. At this point, we can create Know-
ledgeSource instance implementations for enemy selection and flee position calcula-
tions. To allow access of the blackboard to all our agent systems, we can store the black-
board itself on soldierUserData . While there is fundamentally little difference
between storing data on the soldierUserData directly and using the blackboard for
basic attributes, having a common data structure that manages attributes allows for extens-
ibility and easier debugging:

IndirectSoldierAgent.lua :

require "Blackboard"
require "DebugUtilities"
require "KnowledgeSource"
require "SandboxUtilities"
require "Soldier"
require "SoldierController"