Game Design and Artificial Intelligence - Bournemouth University

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Game Design and Artificial Intelligence David Hopkins Implementation When starting development of the game, a lot of time was spent designing the character and crew AI side of the program but most of the coding time was involved with the space combat system, as this was pivotal to getting a functioning and fun product. It required these visuals for understanding what the player is attempting to achieve. The main factor proved to be time and learning. At the end of this project, there was an emphasis on producing something that was fun to play and interactive with the player but could still carry across much of the concept work. Once the space combat system was developed, there was little time left to spend on the crew FSM system, however some items have been implemented to indicate what could have been if more time was available. Handling data When designing a skeleton structure of the game engine, the file system was split into three main sections. One of the sections would be dedicated to the interior of the ship, checking on the conditions of each of the crew members and working out the respective work rates. The second section consists of the ship fighting, updating and drawing all objects in the world space. The final section is the main section where everything must be handled including the opengl setup and calls to the other two sections. This was the first time I had attempted to do a programming project using multiple files, and therefore it was key that I passed the correct data around for the game engine to operate. The main pivotal point for this was between the ship combat and the ship interior. The player ship information needs to be passed to the heads up display, the crew work rates need to be sent to the combat system and both sections need to be able to handle key presses. The first attempts at producing the space combat system were flawed due to a lack of cohesion when attempting to pass data to and from the space combat file. After learning the uses of object orientation, this problem was simplified. Object orientation allows information that previously couldn’ t be shared from specific modular files (eg. shipCombat.cpp does not know of objects in crew.cpp) to be accessible by the use of placing the data in sets of interacting objects [macey00]. Using classes to contain the data, through inheritance and the use of the STL(standard template library) [bateman00] I was able to format a much neater and more accessible system. Page 12 of 22
Game Design and Artificial Intelligence David Hopkins Fig 2.1 – Overview of the data handling in the game During this project, it was imperative to try and keep the number of global variables to a minimum if possible as this would be more liable to errors due to repeating names. This was problem was solved by keeping most of the data rapped up in variables in lists with object orientation. The use of Object Factories [rollings01] could also have made a large difference in keeping the code tidy, but a lack of time for the implementation prevented this. Artificial Intelligence and Finite State Machines For this project, the Artificial Intelligence didn’t need to be overly complex, though at one point further research into genetic algorithms and neural networks [aijunkie01] looked a distinct possibility. Neural networks, based on genetic algorithms, try to simulate the way the human brain works by taking a number of inputs into a “ neuron” which effectively calculates a result and returns an output. As impressive as this method of AI is, it seemed needlessly awkward considering what the program required. During the first attempt at the space combat situation, I had already stumbled on the functionality of the FSM (finite state machine). I was working on a system that used a switch statement based on a state which was one of either, fly towards, stop or drift. This is an example of a very simple FSM. Page 13 of 22
Page 1 and 2: Game Design and Artificial Intellig
Page 11: Game Design and Artificial Intellig

Game Design and Artificial Intelligence - Bournemouth University

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?