41–49 of 49 posts
I used this book for a Game AI class and the examples were easy to consume with a good focus on using the methods in real games: http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Games-Ian-Mill... A little pricey, but my favorite intro book for this subject.
The best start I ever had to Artificial Intelligence was via UC Berkeley's CS188 course[1]. This course takes you through the very foundations of AI, from search to planning to basic probability theory. It's been imitated at universities around the world with its open lectures, slides, homework assignments and project code . The projects are the very best part of this course. You start with a blank slate PacMan agent…
AI programmer here...generally "bots" are just AI that is intended to take the place of a player (typically in a versus setting and not a co-op setting). If anything bots are tougher to make then "normal" AI since their value is measured by their performance against humans. Also the less you cheat (perfect knowledge of the other players, perfect aim, etc) the better your bot. Having a non-cheating bot beat a human is…
(for some categories of games!)
I'm almost nitpicking here, but it's important to understand the distinction where when trying to build "human-like" AI that players feel are like the real thing, you also want to emulate human shortcomings. Sometimes it might not be cheating per the rules, but still be obviously outside the realm of current human capabilities.
e.g.: An AI opponent with perfect arithmetical abilities in a game like Scorched Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)
Creating "AI/bots" for games comes in three parts/flavors/divisions: First, and the most critical to most games, is basic behavioral AI. This includes things like pathfinding, locating targets, attacking, and otherwise making an entity in the game interact with the environment in the game. Second, you've got the more abstract parts, the "high-level decisionmaking". This is the AI's strategies and tactics, such as com…
Building off of your #3) An example for this would be the botting programs made for Runescape. Developers wrote an application that would sit on top of the game client and then use reflection in Java to see what's happening in the game: Various objects being created that are now on screen, the players direction, the map grid, etc. The developers of this botting program would then expose their own API and scripting la…
It's worth noting that these were very easy identifiable as bots by behavior. Making AI for a game (that actually seems human and is fun to interact with, past just target selection and pathfinding) is another (much more difficult) set of problems entirely.
[2] http://igg.me/at/screeps/x/9209812 (affiliate link, is that allowed? otherwise: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/screeps).
The best start I ever had to Artificial Intelligence was via UC Berkeley's CS188 course[1]. This course takes you through the very foundations of AI, from search to planning to basic probability theory. It's been imitated at universities around the world with its open lectures, slides, homework assignments and project code . The projects are the very best part of this course. You start with a blank slate PacMan agent…
As for AI (in general, not only for games) - AFAIK nowadays most serious work is done in non-symbolic, statistics/stochastic direction (including all the Big Data and ML stuff)... So what do you think about pure symbolic AI? Is there any research/advancements done in this part? I know I'm oversimplifying it, but I think you got the point... :)
1. Grab Unreal Engine[1]. It's $20 per month, but you can cancel after the 1st month if you don't want to receive updates. 2. Download the Unreal Tournament project[2] 3. Examine the bot code and start tweaking [1] https://www.unrealengine.com/ [2] http://www.unrealtournament.com/ Unreal is an industry-grade game engine that is also quite accessible. AI can be scripted in Blueprint (a visual dataflow scripting langua…
I plan to start looking into the Unreal engine soon after I get experience with a more basic engine. Have you found a lot of the resources available are able to get you started well? Or is there a large learning curve? My main experience is in writing Rails apps, Ruby gems, a couple basic Android apps, and everything DevOps.
I'd say it's easier to learn than Unity at this point, but harder than 2D engines like GameMaker. I think some basic experience making simple 2D games will help a lot before the transition to 3D.
If you're already familiar with Javascript and you want to start making games at a lower level you could try the PhaserJS framework.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Building off of your #3) An example for this would be the botting programs made for Runescape. Developers wrote an application that would sit on top of the game client and then use reflection in Java to see what's happening in the game: Various objects being created that are now on screen, the players direction, the map grid, etc. The developers of this botting program would then expose their own API and scripting la…
Right. I wrote one of the earlier RuneScape 2 bots around 8 years ago (example script https://clbin.com/71NIX ). It's worth noting that these were very easy identifiable as bots by behavior. Making AI for a game (that actually seems human and is fun to interact with, past just target selection and pathfinding) is another (much more difficult) set of problems entirely.