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Back to Artificial Intelligence

How to structure things in an RTS for AIs

Adam Brown · 2011-08-08T21:31:38

So I'm making a "game" where there is a ssuuppeerr simple RTS game, and you write an AI to play it for you. And challenge other people's AIs and such. Now I have a super simple little RTS game up and running. And I'm taking a crack at how to write an AI against it. And one area I'm seeing a lot of question marks in, is how to structure the units (game objects) them selves in order to provide lots of useful information to AIs. My current idea is to have two "event" queues: 1) Current 2) Previous Each tick of the simulation, each unit will clear it's "Previous" queue, and then move it's "Current" queue into the previous queue. Then it will go on processing like normal, and what ever it is doing that tick (moving, attacking, harvesting resources, ect) will be added to the "Current" queue. Then when the AIs get a chance to process for that tick, they can examine the queues of each Unit and see what they are doing, and what they were doing. Is this a sane way of doing things? How do other games handle this? Lastly, I have another issue to think about. I'm doing this in Javascript, so there really is no public/private in the traditional sense. So I don't want to give the AIs direct access to the Units, because they would have access to things like setPosition() which would allow for teleporting (aka cheating ). So how do other games get around this? Do they usually just not care b/c AIs are generally trusted pieces of code? The only thought I've had so far about this is to provide a Proxy object that the AI gets access to and only has "safe" methods which it proxies on through to the actual game object. But this is kinda clunky... requires an extra class for every Game Object. Thanks in advance for the help

Artificial Intelligence Programming

Started by Wavesonics August 02, 2011 09:27 PM

11 comments, last by ApochPiQ 13 years, 1 month ago

IADaveMark

3,839

August 08, 2011 02:31 PM

What if I want to write my AI using behavior trees instead of flat state machines?

Then the transition logic is collected and packed up in a really neat reasoner.

This whole conversation is really kind of obtuse until we set some better bounds on what we are trying to accomplish.

Dave Mark - President and Lead Designer of Intrinsic Algorithm LLC
Professional consultant on game AI, mathematical modeling, simulation modeling
Co-founder and 10 year advisor of the GDC AI Summit
Author of the book, Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI
Blogs I write:
IA News - What's happening at IA | IA on AI - AI news and notes | Post-Play'em - Observations on AI of games I play

"Reducing the world to mathematical equations!"

Wavesonics

Author

330

August 08, 2011 02:35 PM

Hey guys, thanks for all the replies.

Quite busy right now, but in the next day or so I'll post back with the architecture I implemented. It's far from perfect, but I'm trying to get a 100% working version out there. Then I'd love to discuss this all further and refine things more.

==============================
A Developers Blog | Dark Rock Studios - My Site

ApochPiQ

23,138

August 08, 2011 09:31 PM

[quote name='ApochPiQ' timestamp='1312770494' post='4846021']
What if I want to write my AI using behavior trees instead of flat state machines?

Then the transition logic is collected and packed up in a really neat reasoner.

[/quote]

My point was that there are (good) ways to structure an AI implementation which are not fundamentally isomorphic to the simplistic state machine structure that was being suggested.

Wielder of the Sacred Wands
[Work - ArenaNet] [Epoch Language] [Scribblings]

How to structure things in an RTS for AIs

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