Friday, February 15, 2008
Some Information About AI Progress
We have been working hard on the game’s AI lately, and it has been a quite rewarding and frustrating experience. While we have gotten the AI to start doing the basics which has been a great reward getting there has been a quite frustrating experience.
It has mostly been frustrating since it has taken a whole lot of structuring to give the AI more of its basic behaviours. For example, to get the AI to start to explore the world around it took quite a bit of drawing and planning before there was any idea to start implementing it.
Also, lately the AI has started finding bugs in the game, such as trees not being correctly removed on all maps when cut down by workers. This is quite amusing in some ways since it’s not that was even possible to find as a player. That specific thing was quite frustrating to find a solution for however.
The AI can now explore the world around it, or at least its closest surroundings until it finds the resources it requires for further development. It can train additional workers when it needs them and it can find a suitable location to place a training ground in that is the most strategical valid place it can place it in and order the construction, which then takes place.
We have come quite far in our AI development since the last blog post, but we have still got quite a bit to go until we’re at our minimum required level. We still believe that we can do it and it is looking promising, even if it’s going to be hard work and long hours to get there.
The game may not be as perfectly polished as we hoped earlier on, but it will be playable and it will have an AI that is capable of playing it.
No screenshots today as we can not really show off an AI working in screenshots, and even though we’ve also done minor adjustments to the graphical interface and placement of fences they will not be shown off yet.