Reactive Techniques in Game Development

Just like the behaviors, reactive—or reflexive—techniques have many advantages. In fact, reactive AI techniques have been at the core of most games since the start of game development. As explained, these techniques are often enhanced to provide non-determinism, but this can often be simplified into a deterministic mapping.

Advantages in Standard Game AI

The major advantage of reactive techniques is that they are fully deterministic. Because the exact output is known given any input pattern, the underlying code and data structures can be optimized to shreds. The debugging process is also trivial. If something goes wrong, the exact reason can be pinpointed.

The time complexity for determining the output is generally constant. There is no thinking or deliberation; the answer is a reflex, available almost immediately. This makes reactive techniques ideally suited to games.

Success stories of such approaches are very common, and not only in computer games. Historically, these are the most widely used techniques since the dawn of game AI:

• Scripts are small programs (mostly reactive) that compute a result given some parameters. Generally, only part of the programming language's flexibility is used to simplify the task.

• Rule-based systems are a collection of "if...then" statements that are used to manipulate variables. These are more restrictive than scripts, but have other advantages.

• Finite-state machines can be understood as rules defined for a limited number of situations, describing what to do next in each case.

These standard techniques have proven extremely successful. Scripts essentially involve using plain programming to solve a problem (see Chapter 25, "Scripting Tactical Decisions"), so they are often a good choice. Rule-based systems (covered in Part II) and finite-state machines (discussed in Part VI) can be achieved with scripting, but there are many advantages in handling them differently.

Advantages for Animats

The reactive approach also has benefits for animats, improving learning and dealing with embodiment extremely well.

Embodiment

With embodiment, most of the information perceived by the animat is from the surroundings, which needs to be interpreted to produce intelligence. Reactive behaviors are particularly well-suited to interpreting this local information about the world (as animals have evolved to do).

Also, it's possible to make the reactive behaviors more competent by providing the animat with more information about the environment. Thanks to their well-developed senses, humans perform very well with no advanced knowledge of their environment. Instead of using better AI, the environment can provide higher-level information—matching human levels of perception. Essentially, we make the environment smarter, not the animats.

Learning

Most learning techniques are based on learning reactive mappings. So if we actually want to harness the power of learning, problems need to be expressed as reactive.

Additionally, it's often very convenient to teach the AI using the supervised approach: "In this situation, execute this action." Reactive behaviors are the best suited to modeling this.