Tuesday 17 January 2012

Bot Behaviour Is Difficult

I didn't think it was going to be easy but I am finding getting good responses from my Bots is more complicated than I had anticipated. 

The mechanism I designed works and I can add various types of behaviour but the slightest omission in my thinking and the Bot does something peculiar or just stands there.

I'm adding more and more detailed debug information to help work out what situations trigger what responses from the Bots.


I found there is plenty of information available about the high level designs of various methods like Behaviour Trees or State Machines but not a great deal about what behaviours a First Person Shooter (FPS) Bot needs to process.

I've spent a lot of time with paper, pencil and eraser sketching out charts similar to the following:

Then coding those and now trying to fill in the gaps that testing has highlighted as problems.

It is very frustrating at the moment but I am sure it will be worth it in the end.

2 comments:

Ranger Chris said...

Frustrating or not, I really like your posts will continue to follow you. Keep up the good work.

Glad to see a post telling that game development is HARD WORK!

Chris

John C Brown said...

I appreciate the encouragement. I know what you mean about posts. Most of them, including most of my own, show the end result but they don't show the hours and hours of trial and error that went to get to the end result.

Many thanks.