Skirmish Update

Being sick and travel does a number on productivity for side projects. Alas this means that comparatively little has been completed in the last month.

The Caravan level's introduction, dialogue, and scripting are written and working (although it needs polish of course). The main content of the scenario is next, and that was a daunting prospect. This is the first scenario where we need a somewhat intelligent enemy. Intelligent in that it can use skills at the right times, find new paths when paths are blocked, and react to the player. The original concept was to build this within the scripting system for the scenario.

But we knew in the future that we were going to want to build procedural scenarios. Procedural scenarios can't have custom scripts to control enemies. Thus was born the need for a enemy control system; an AI one tier higher than our current AIs.

The current AIs in the system behave very primitively. It manages movement and pathing, deciding on an action to execute, handling getting to a relative range of their target, deciding on a target (through aggro/threat mechanics), etc. These operate at an individual level; each unit runs these control structures independently. One of those controls is the formation follower behavior, which keeps them trying to work together and in formation. There's plenty of complexity there that had to get handled, but it doesn't have any concept of future planning or any kind of analysis.

A while back (maybe 2 years ago) I worked on a system to control enemy formations, consisting of a set of directives which were selected through a cost function and periodically sampled. It really, really doesn't work. It kind of worked, but then it didn't. If you're wondering why the current scenarios don't have any enemy formations, this is why. Those of you who have played know there is one scenario with enemy commanders, and that they are barely barely barely functional.

So the need for an AI that runs on top of the behaviors is obvious. That's the current project. I'm building an AI Planner that looks at the current state, derives its options from available actions, derives its goals from the objectives (or script), and tries to come up with a sequence of actions to accomplish it. Then, searches over the space of sequences to find the best one.

The low level planner took a couple weeks to get working at a level I'm happy with. I'm now working on integrating the planner into the actual game. As of right now, the planner runs and the plan can be executed, but all it knows about is naive movement. It can move to its goal but basically it just knows how to dumbly right-click and hope for the best.

But it's a start. I built an AI obstacle course. When it can find its way through I'll make a vid.

.... AI is hard!