Monday, February 25, 2008
Sort-of-weekly Progress Update
This entry has been delayed a couple of days. This is due to some technical problems we had with the blog last friday.
The past week we have worked mostly on fixing problems and bugs. While we found and took care of a lot there are still a few known bugs left. We are working on getting them all out of our system.
Some things that were fixed are that the Overmind’s priority of things is actually now carried down the line all the way to the end reciever and not lost along the way. This has solved some of the erratic behaviour our workers had at times and they are now (to us) more predictable in what they’re doing.
We also did some work on the pathfinding algorithm to improve our units ability to move around in a more appropriate fashion. This includes walking to the actual closest bridge they see when they need to get over water even when they don’t see the full map. Also they now handle walking over hills better, only doing it when needed.
Furthermore we improved on the Overmind’s ability to move units around to explore the world by adding another method of exploring that is more direct. This improves the AI’s ability to do searches for resources that it is lacking.
During the week we tried some different rendering methods for water and decided against the reflective/refractive method since triple-pass rendering wasn’t really worth it for the effect it gave. We are now working on a different method that should be more resource-effective.
Terrain textures have been improved a bit by a graphics artist and as such the terrain now looks better than it did before.
Monday, February 18, 2008
AI doing what it’s supposed to do, and other progress display
The AI has progressed a bit and it is now time to show off some of what it is capable of. Sadly we will not be doing another video for a while until the AI behaves in a more (to us) predictable fashion and is capable of doing more decisions on its own.
This is a screenshot showing the AI after it has constructed a building and collected some resources using Peons that it has trained by itself when it found training them to be necessary for its purposes: screenshot35.PNG. Getting the AI to do that many steps of thought to to achieve the goal of having a training ground which gives it the possibility of creating an army is quite a big step in the right direction towards making the AI an actual opponent that can actually beat the player.
In the state the game is in now the player has the possibility to hand over control of its units to an AI that then plays them to the best of its ability. This is a screenshot of the same game where the Ai has taken care of the player’s units, trained Peasants, collected resources and constructed a training ground: screenshot35.PNG. Both of the AI:s in this game have been working towards trying to get a training ground to get military units to be able to fight each other. However, the actual military control is yet to be implemented so they do not try to pump out an army or attack each other yet.
Finally we wanted to show off some of the possible buildings and units constructed around a well: LeAwesome.PNG. This also shows how walls get properly linked to each other to form a defensive palisade towards oncoming attackers.
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.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Slight Changes - Updated Documentation
The last two days we’ve been revising our research and documentation. We came up with a few things that were either badly worded or needed changing for other reasons.
The things changed are:
* The Resource AI does some of its things by proxy, namely through the Cognitive AI. The research document has been updated to better explain this.
* The resource AI has also been changed from a Heap to a sorted Queue that uses Radix Sort. This is due to that using a Heap would be highly memory ineffective and not faster in any way when it comes to the small number of resource requests handled at any one time.
* The sound effects can not be volume controlled separately from the background music in XNA, hence the controls for it has been removed.
* Grouping and Ungrouping has been split from being one Hotkey button to two. Namely G and U instead of just G. This is mostly due to that it wouldn’t really be possible to know whether a user wished to split or merge groups or not with using just one button.
Documents that have been updated are:
Design Document
AI Research Document
As for progress on the actual game the AI can now capture wells without any external input, some hotkeys have been implemented, the resource AI is in progress/almost done and we’ve begun working on making the AI explore the world on its own.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Weekly Progress Report
This past week we’ve spent most of our time working on things that don’t really show since they are more a part of the back end of the game. Things like modifiying the path finder to work better with moving through unchartered territories and making workers better capable of judging the distance to the closest tree.
Also, we’ve been doing a lot of minor fixes in menus such as adding the province selection screen allowing us to play multiple provinces, sounds and making some parts of the game more dynamic that were statically locked for testing earlier on. As far as we’ve tested all our already implemented features now work as they should.
However, a few things do show graphically, here are some screens showing those things:
ScreenNew3.PNG: This screenshot shows the province map screen, with the second map from the left on the top row owned by the player and the rest taken by the enemy.
ScreenNew1.PNG: Showing off the now visually represented Fog of War. In this screenshot very little has been explored and as such the rest of the world is covered in darkness.
ScreenNew2.PNG: Here more is explored, and it shows mountains partially obscured by the fog of war.
