So - the last couple of weeks I have been working on building a framework for some AI.
In a game like the one I'm building, this is rather important. I estimate 40% of my time is gonna go into the AI. What I want is a hunting game, where the AI learns from the players behaviour. This is actually what is gonna make the game fun to play. This will require some learning from the creatures that the player hunt and some collective intelligence per species. Since I am not going to spend oceans of Time creating dialogue, tons of cut-scenes and an epic story-line and multiple levels (I can't make something interesting enough to make it worth the time - I need more man-power for that), what I can do, is create some interesting AI and the feeling of being an actual hunter, that has to depend on analysis of the animals and experimentation on where to attack from. SO.. To make it as generic as possible, I mediated everything, using as many interfaces a possible for the system. You can see the general system here in the UML diagram. I customized it for Unity so that it is required to add all the scripts to GameObjects in the game world. This gives a better overview, but requires some setup - not that bothersome.
If you add some simple Game Objects and some colors, it could look like this in Unity3D:
Now, this system works beautifully. The abstraction of the Animation Controller and Movement Controller assumes some standard stuff that applies for all creatures. For example that they all can move, have eating-, sleeping and drinking animations, and have a PathFinder script attached somewhere in the hierarchy. It's very generic and easy to customize. At some point I'll upload a video of the flocking behavior and general behavior of this creature. For now, I'm gonna concentrate on finishing the Player model, creating a partitioned terrain for everything to exist in. Finally and equally important, I have to design a learning system for all the creatures. This will be integrated into the Brain of all the creatures, but I might separate the collective intelligence between the species.
It's taking shape, but I still have a lot of modelling to do, generating terrain and modelling/generating trees and vegetation.
Thanks for reading,
Alpha-
I'd be glad to share my insight and experience with neural networked AI, including purely genetic / adaptive AI (which require no formal training data in order to improve themselves), but you know what? For most games, FSM are adequate, behaviour trees are awesome, you don't really need to get too carried away, and if you do, you can always add a bit more script.