AI

So what is AI?

When you think of AI, what kind of terms or aspects would actually go well with AI? Well AI can be used for enemies, decisions, and rules. AI takes those things and brings them into a realistic perspective. According to Ian Millington, AI or Artificial Intelligence is about making computers able to perform thinking tasks that humans and animals are capable of. Its providing an illusion of  NPCs or non-player characters to be doing a human-like behaviour trait. AI gives an illusion of the characters being intelligent. Examples include characters getting out of the way when something is about to run into them or running towards a soccer ball when it gets near them. Of course we all know that nothing really has an artificial intelligent mindset. We can only make the computer mimick or follow human behaviour.

Most modern games address 3 basic needs:

• Movement
• Decision Making
• Strategy

Movement

Algorithms that turn decisions into some kind of motion. This is where NPCs actually moves around in the game world. In order for NPCs to look intelligent we have to use physics. 

Seek Behaviour is when you have a character that is seeking another character. It calculates the direction from the initial position to the target position. It also requires some sort of velocity  as it moves from each location to another.

Flee Behaviour is the opposite of seek behaviour. Instead of trying to find the character you are trying to run away from the character.

Arriving Behaviour is used with seek because when we finally get to the player we want a realistic look to it by making the character slow down.

Wandering Behaviour allows the character to move in a direction of a current orientation with a maximum speed at each time step.

Pathfinding is another way in which a character can get from point A to point B. In order for this to happen we use graphs in the game world. The graphs filled up with nodes in which characters can move from one node to another using A*.

Decision Making

This involves what kind of behaviours should the character does in case this happens. What to do next? Programmers have to include a range of behaviours like standing, sitting, walking, attacking, wandering, and so forth in the computer but there is still a matter of knowing where and when to execute these types of behaviours. 

AI in AEOLUS

For this semester, we used turrets as the enemy of our game Aeolus. When the player flies within a certain distance, the heads of the turrets will turn towards the player and shoot lasers at them. For next semester we will be introducing much more enemies in our game that will somewhat  have a similar behaviour as the turrets or maybe have multiple behaviour if we can think of any because it is a helicopter combat game. Despite that, we definitely will be trying out new things in the near future for Aeolus.

Conclusion

Sims is a good example of a game that uses AI. NPCs wander around the game world until the player's Sim comes into contact with them. Same thing goes for any FIFA soccer game. The characters will run in the direction the ball is heading but will not actually be running towards it. All of these things allow a game to give off the illusion to its players and therefore gives good gameplay.