Friday, September 16, 2005

Switching to Artificial Intelligence

I have switched from working on TrueAxis plugin for OPAL to designing some basic AI, because it was taking a bit too much time. And I feel that it is more important and productive to construct some basic scene and start working on the game play.

The thing about game play is that it is really hard to develop it unless there is an enemy to fight with. Here, I had two choices, either implement networking or develop some AI. Network is kind of ready for further developing, but I decided to go with AI. I had a few ideas ready to go.

At the moment I am working on navigation for AI. The current implementation does not require static environment, which is perfect for destructible physics of Ukrainian Rumble 2. It also does not require precomputation. The drawback is the luck of scalability, since at the large number of objects, navigation may become CPU-intensive. This however should only appear at a really large scale environments. It could be resolved though via use of octrees.

The navigation is near its finish. Vehicle control from the navigation recommendation is still being tested and fixed, but it is operational nonetheless. Once it is done, the easy step will be control of a tank tower to aim at the target and fire. This will be much simplier than navigation, though.

Soon, the scene creation will begin: the campus of the University of Louisville, KY.