What is Game AI Simulator?
- Tyler Fronczak
- Jan 7, 2018
- 2 min read
Updated: May 16, 2018
Summary
Game AI Simulator will be a simulation application for Android devices that offers an opportunity for experimentation with AI in a dynamic real-time environment. It will serve to familiarize users with various concepts that form the basis of modern game AI, all while providing a highly interactive experience.
To be more specific, this project will be a Unity application that puts the user in control of a 3D world where they are free to interact with the environment and the AI agents. In terms of the environment, the user will be able to set the navigation parameters, modify a tile’s texture, weight, and elevation, as well as add or remove tiles, obstacles, and points of interest. In terms of AI, the user will be able to modify the behaviors, attributes, and architectures of agents, which is further detailed below:
Behaviors- Observable actions that the agents perform in relation to each other and their environment. Ideally, the range of behaviors in the project will cover many of the natural behaviors that are observable in wild animals such as hunting, eating, roaming, climbing, jumping, and flying.
Attributes- Propensity and effectiveness to which agents perform their behaviors. The list of attributes that will be available to each agent includes hearing, vision, mass, diet, strength, and speed.
Architectures- Logical and programmatic structures of the agents, which affects the suitability of an agent for particular situations and environments. These architectures may include hierarchical finite state machine, behavior tree, goal oriented action planning, utility based, and machine learning.
Example
As an example of what this project will explore, the following throwaway prototype was created using Java and Android Studio. This prototype demonstrates flow field pathfinding, which is a computationally cheap option for navigation when a program contains hundreds or thousands of agents.
Going Forward
All essential assets will be programmed from scratch using C# within Unity, which will allow for free distribution of the project. If at anytime you are interested in digging into this project's code, it can be accessed through GitHub at: https://github.com/TylerFronczak/GameAISimulator
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