In Closing

As a conclusion, I will provide some AI coding hints for a variety of action-based genres.

Platform Games

The first genre we will address is that of platform/jump'n'run games such as Mario or Jak and Daxter. In these games, AI is all about variety, having lots of enemies to keep the game fresh and new. On the other hand, these AIs are not very complex because encounters with AI enemies are quite short and simple. From the moment we see the baddie in such a game to the moment either he or we are dead, only a few seconds pass.

Platform game enemies can be easily coded using finite-state machines. In the simplest incarnation, they can be sequential/choreographed AIs that perform deterministic moves. Turtles in the first Mario game, for example, walked up and down map areas and killed on contact. Many old-school classics were built with this idea in mind.

One step higher in the complexity scale, we can implement chasers that get activated whenever the player is within a certain range. This represents the vast majority of AIs found in platformers, often hidden in great aesthetics that largely increase the believability of the character. Sometimes, these chasers will have the ability to shoot, which is implemented with parallel automata. One controls locomotion and the other just shoots whenever we are within angular reach.

Another interesting AI type is the turret, be it an actual turret that shoots, a poisonous plant that spits, or anything in between. A turret is just a fixed entity that rotates, and when aiming at the player, shoots at him. This behavior can be implemented with the eye contact approach explained at the beginning of the chapter.

Whichever AI type you choose, platform games require AIs to perform sequences that show off their personalities. The basic behavior will be one of the behaviors we have seen so far. But usually, we will code an AI system with some extra states, so the character somehow has a personality that is engaging to the player. I will provide two examples here.

In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, there are gorillas that chase the player and kill on contact. They are triggered by distance. A gorilla stands still until we approach to within 10 meters. Then, he just walks toward us, and whenever he makes contact, tries to hit us. But this is just a plain chase behavior, which would make the game too linear and boring if that is all the gorilla did. Besides, we need a way to beat the gorillas—maybe a weak spot that makes them winnable. Thus, the gorilla expands his behavior to incorporate a short routine that involves hitting his chest with both fists, the same way real gorillas do. As a result, the gorilla chases us around, and whenever he's tired or a certain amount of time has elapsed, he stops, does the chest-hitting routine, and starts over. This makes sense because the gorilla is showing off his personality with this move. But this is also useful because we know we can attack the gorilla whenever he is hitting his chest. That's his weak spot. Many enemies in Jak and Daxter work the same way. They have a basic behavior that is not very different from the behaviors explained in this chapter and some special moves that convey their personalities to the player.

Another, more involved type of enemy is the end-of-level bosses. I'm thinking about usually large enemies that perform complex AI routines. Despite their spectacular size, these AIs are in fact not much different than your everyday chaser or patrolling grunt. The main difference is usually their ability to carry out complex, long-spanning choreographies. Although these routines can become an issue from a design standpoint, their implementation is nearly identical to that of the cases we have analyzed so far. As an example, consider the killing plant from Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. This is a large creature, about 5 meters tall, that tries to kill our hero by hitting him with its head. The flower is fixed to the ground, so it's not easy to avoid it. To make things more interesting, every now and then the flower will spawn several small spiders, which will become chasers. So you have to avoid the flower and keep an eye on the spiders while killing them. Then, the carnivorous flower will fall asleep every so often, so we can climb on it and hit it. By following this strategy repeatedly, we can finally beat it. Take a look at the summary presented in Figure 7.9.

As engaging and well designed as this may sound, all this complexity does not really affect our implementation. The boss is just a sequential automata that has a special ability of generating new creatures, but overall the implementation is really straightforward.

Shooters

We will now focus on shooters like Half-Life or Goldeneye. These games are a bit more complex than platformers because the illusion of realistic combat must be conveyed. The core behavior engine is usually built around finite state machines (FSMs): simple sequential algorithms that convey the attack and defend sequences. Also, the comment about aesthetics-driven AI in the previous section is also valid here. We need the character to convey his personality in the game.

Most shooters these days allow enemies to think in terms of the scenario and its map. Enemies can follow us around the game level, understand context-sensitive ideas like taking cover, and so on. Thus, we need a logical way to lay out the scenario. A popular approach is to use a graph structure with graph nodes for every room/zone and transitions for gates, doors, or openings between two rooms. This way you can take advantage of the graph exploration algorithm explained in the next chapter. We can use Dijkstra's algorithm to compute paths, we can use crash and turn (also in the next chapter) to ensure that we avoid simple objects such as columns, and so on.

Another interesting trend, which was started by Half-Life, is group behavior for games—being chased by the whole army and so on. Group dynamics are easily integrated into a game engine, and the result is really impressive. Clearly, it's one of those features in which what you get is much more than what you actually ordered.

Fighting Games

The algorithms used to code fighting games vary greatly from one case to another. From quasi-random action selection in older titles to today's sophisticated AIs and learning features, fighting AI has evolved spectacularly.

As an example, we could implement a state machine with seven states: attack, stand, retreat, advance, block, duck, and jump. When connected in a meaningful way, these states should create a rather realistic fighting behavior. All we need to do is compute the distance to the player and the move he's performing and decide which behavior to trigger. Adding a timer to the mix ensures the character does not stay in the same state forever.

If you want something more sophisticated, we can build a predictive AI, where the enemy learns to detect action sequences as he fights us. Here, the enemy would learn our favorite moves and adapt to them. The idea is quite straightforward: Keep a list with the chronological sequence of the last N player movements. This can be a circular queue, for example. Then, using standard statistics, compute the degree of independence from the events in the queue. For example, if the player is performing a kick and then a punch, we need to compute whether these two events are correlated. Thus, we compute the number of times they appear in sequence versus the number of times a kick is not followed by a punch. Tabulating these correlations, we can learn about the player's fighting patterns and adapt to them. For example, the next time he begins the kick sequence, we will know beforehand whether or not he's likely to punch afterward, so we can take appropriate countermeasures.

The finite-state machine plus correlations approach is very powerful. It is just a problem of adding states to the machine so we have more and more flexibility. If we need to create several fighters, each with its own style, all we need to do is slightly change the states or the correlation-finding routine to change the fighter's personality. Don't be overly optimistic, though, most games implement character personality at the purely aesthetic level, giving each character specific moves, a certain attitude in the animation, and so on.

So far, our fighter is highly reactive. He knows how to respond to attacks efficiently by learning our behavior patterns. It would be great, especially for higher-difficulty enemies, to make him proactive as well, making him capable of performing sophisticated tactics. To do so, the ideal technique would be to use space-state search. The idea would be to build a graph (not a very big one, indeed) with all the movement possibilities, chained in sequences. Then, by doing a limited depth search (say, three or four levels), we can get the movement sequence that better suits our needs according to a heuristic. Then, the heuristic would be used to implement the personality. Although this looks like a good idea, executing the state search in real time at 60 frames per second (fps) can be an issue.

Thus, a simpler approach is to use a tabulated representation. We start with a table with simple attack moves and their associated damage. Then, every time we do a new attack combination, we store the damage performed and the distance at which we triggered it. For example, we can store:

Distance = 3 meters, high kick, jump, punch, Damage = 5

Then, we can use this list afterward, accessing it by distance and selecting the attack that maximizes damage. It's all just very simple pattern matching both for the attack and defense, but it produces the right look and feel.

Racing Titles

Racing games are easily implemented by means of rule-based systems. Generally speaking, most racing games are just track followers with additional rules to handle actions like advancing on a slower vehicle, blocking the way of another vehicle that tries to advance, and so on. A general framework of the rule set would be (starting with the higher priority rules):

If we are behind another vehicle and moving faster advance

If we are in front of another vehicle and moving slower block his way

Else follow the track

The advance behavior can be implemented as a state machine or, even simpler, using field theory to model the repulsion that makes a car advance on another by passing it from the side. Here the cars would just be particles attracted to the center of the track, and each car we happen to find standing in our way would be repulsive particles.

The track follow is often coded using a prerecorded trajectory that traverses the track optimally. A plug-in is used to analyze the track and generate the ideal trajectory. Then, at runtime the drivers just try to follow that race pattern, using the higher-priority rules as needed.