The Art of Strategic and Tactical AI in RTS Games

Post Mortem

sp4 sp4@student.ltu.se — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:37:59 +0100

Our Post Mortem document has now been commited to the SVN.

It can be found here: AI_RTS_postmortem.doc

Due to technical problems no new build has been committed, that will come later.

Region Wars - MS3

sp4 sp4@student.ltu.se — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:02:01 +0100

Design Document
Progress Report

Presentation

Time Plan

Game Demo
Preview Video 4

While the game is not perfect it is entirely playable and the AI does play the game as it was supposed to even if it doesn’t always make the ultimate strategic decision as it still needs training in what tactics that are good to employ in the game.

Edit: Better Preview Video 4 Encode (quality wise), where it is much easier to read the text, some minor edits for clarity, a few shortened scenes and altered background music: Preview Video 4 (mov, h.264 2-pass, 800×600 - 275MB)

Friday Progress Report

sp4 sp4@student.ltu.se — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:37:36 +0100

Since last time we’ve been mostly working on our other assignment that is due in two days. Hence the progress of the project has been minimal.

Even though it’s been minimal some quite useful things have actually been done. The models we are currently using have been optimized to improve our frame rate when there are hundreds of units on the screen at once.

The AI has also been improved to make him build pre-requisites needed for training some of the units and it is now capable of producing some of the other units besides from footmen. He does not do the selection of which type of unit to produce entirely strategically, but it is a step in the right direction.

The pressure is on now to get this finished, and it will be a big task to accomplish. We are relatively confident of that we will finish the game on time, however there will be no time to do any of the if time or wishlist items.

Progress report after arbitrary amount of time

sp4 sp4@student.ltu.se — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:46:48 +0100

This past weekend we’ve done some stress testing by letting the game run for quite some time (Wednesday to Monday). The game was still running after four days and twenty hours looking like this: 4d.png

Results on a second testing machine shows these stats: 4days.png. Quite a few more units created.

Both machines ran without crashing and only had minor issues with running while windows was in locked mode. Locked mode seems to mess up the resource handling to some extent, trees mostly. This is due to windows way of dealing with display devices while in locked mode tends to cause the game to stop rendering and as such stop removing depleated trees.

The week so far

sp4 sp4@student.ltu.se — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:35:00 +0100

This week we have finally gotten the AI to start producing units. This has lead it to start amass it’s armies and now only waiting for the capability to manage them to victory. This has lead us to do an early progress report and not wait the usual week. So, there is a big possibility there won’t be a progress report friday unless we have something major done by then.

A screenshot showing an AI-created army: SuperArmyOfDoom.PNG

Also we’ve been working a bit on load-balancing trying to tweak the pathfinding to work more optimized, more balanced resource gathering, and started on the Military AI.

The progress this week can be summarized in one picture:

A lot of activity going on, a lot of commits, and a lot of improvements.