Hello, once again, with free time on my hands, I will look to this forum for some help. As my time at school passes, I realize I might not make it as a gameprogrammer, or even a programmer. However, I would still like to see a graphical representation of little artificial "beings" running around using my code, as a means of determining their actions. So, my question is, once again, how could I draw a maze, draw 2 or more "beings" and have them obey the "walls" or other objects in my "maze" or even "world". The closest I got to this was make a little "circle" that chased down a user controlled "circle" always choosing the fastest route. However, it only went up if it had to, same for down, left and right, but that was fine for me. I can imply other things later like going where the user is heading, or making the "circle" seem more realistic. So, my main concern right now, is getting a worldly or maze like setting, or even a fake football field, 2d or 3d, with basic code to make the "beings" obey the laws of the setting, and an option to code them to react and move about as I please. I dont care, I would even try and code like a one screen mario world with a little bug chasing mario, and a turtle too... but, if it would be just as easy to code a quake 3 bot (unlikely, but maybe) or anything in between, I would love it. So, my question is to you out there, is there anything available to me that would allow me to do my testing as I wish??? Or, is all code "top secret" and not available. One thing I tried, was coding robots in all the robot war things on the net, but, with no tutorials, or books, and no people to talk to for help, I made basically zero progress. Maybe, I am not smart enough, but... maybe I am just looking at the wrong things, the wrong places. So please, if you know of where I can get my hands on a virtual setting as I have mentioned, please tell me, or send it to me, or if neither of these works, give me ideas on how to code it. My last thing was coded in turing, just because I could make circles, and make them move around most easily, last semester, I took java, and this semester, were working in ''C'' Anway, I have likely talked too much, Thanks, Dustin

Unfortunatly im in no positio to help ou right now, sorry.

But if its any consulation:
You mentioned not being clever enough, that has othing to do with it, even the dumbest person could achieve t least something, all you have to do is stick with it,
if you try hard enogh youll succeed, things have to go right sometime.

If i thik of anything that will help you, ill let you know.

Anyway, good luck, im sure someone''l point you in the right direction.

Dustin,

There are two things you can do IMHO :

1) You can start from scratch and write an app yourself. That way you can make what you want, but it''ll take long and as usual you''ll have to write alot to make the app work that doesn''t concern the AI (I''m talking screen build-up and stuff...)

2) Or you can go with one of the pre-made things like you mentioned, but indeed, alot of them are pretty complicated or not well worked out. You say, you''ve been doing Java last semester, well, have you come across
http://robocode.alphaworks.ibm.com/home/home.html

It''s a program-your-robot-and-send-it-in-the-arena thing from IBM, that was mentioned before here on the board. The good part is, you can write your robot completely in Java so it functions like an Java-AI toolkit. I haven''t tested it myself (if only I had more time ) but since it is from IBM I guess it will be better quality than most of the other similar approaches.

Anyway, have fun programming,


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StrategicAlliance

On the day we create intelligence and consciousness, mankind becomes God.
On the day we create intelligence and consciousness, mankind becomes obsolete...
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From your description, I would suggest searching on keywords such as "pathfinding" "a-star" (a*) "collision detection" and checking out various urls based on these words (sorry don''t recall the domains ) "aidepot", "gameai" and "generation5". And the java robot demo is really cool too. If you have some familiarity with Java and are just getting started with C, I would definitely check that out. And no the code isn''t "top secret" - there are plenty of examples on the www - it just takes some time to ferret them out.

‘But truth's a menace, science a public danger.’ Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

LessBread was referring to http://www.ai-depot.com... they have some nifty stuff (although i am not far enough into AI to know if it is wonderful or not)...

--- krez (krezisback@aol.com)

Hey, thanks for all the messages, I was waiting untill most people had replied before I would again. Anyway, I can see that here, and in the game programming forum, some people are a little confused by my questioning. That, however, is not their fault, as I was likely unclear.

Nonetheless, what I am looking for specifically is some program that I can run, and run my coded "beings" in this program(hopefully of a world, or field!). Anyway, I am now trying this robocode, and, while I can transfer movies, or any other files to any on the guelph network at speeds of 1 megabyte per second, I have been downloading this 1.97 mb filfor 15 minutes, and still have only 7%. Now, I am just wondering, does anyone else know a lot about this program, so I will have people to ask questions to??? And, can anyone answer my revised question any better than before???

Thanks, Dustin

"The world is safe from computers, untill some idiot gives them ambition!" -- Dustin McCulloch(1999)