Shockbot Nodegen

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Electro
Posts: 312
Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:25 pm
Location: Brisbane, Australia
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Shockbot Nodegen

Post by Electro »

Hi guys

I found some old demos laying around showing shockbot's "nodegen" feature. The idea behind this feature was initially to just automatically create nodes (or waypoints if you prefer) for levels without any human interaction (no manual placement!). After doing quite a lot of research and spending time on it, I came to the realisation that any ideas that I DID originally have and implement for handling tricky situations like jumps, would still fall apart in a lot of cases.

So this feature was put completely on the backburner (as opposed to the bot itself, which was put on the slightly closer backburner).

It'd be useful for mappers who are working on something and don't want to have to place nodes manually every time, or tweak them at every iteration. It's only good for general navigation, no fancy jumps.

Automated node generation will NEVER be as good as manually placed nodes. This is a sad truth, and the sooner you can come to realise this as I have, the better :P Manually placed nodes are more precise, more efficient, and will allow for more complex human-like behaviors.

These demos show the bot in it's earlier very debug infancy, and since... things like ledge detection/avoidance and more cleanup in nodegen have been implemented. Another bug you will notice in the klzvob demo, is the bot spaz's out when it runs out of things to pickup in the level, this issue has also been fixed (as shown in the alcyone video I posted a while ago).

These demos were recorded in DP, back over a year ago, I don't know if that means they're completely broken when trying to play them in another engine or not... so you can let me know about that ;)
Try to ignore the debug text that all gets slapped in your face constantly, and just look at the bot itself (except when it's making mistakes! ... because those have mostly been addressed)

Here you go! :)

http://www.bendarling.net/downloads/sho ... en_dm4.dem
http://www.bendarling.net/downloads/sho ... klzvob.dem

klzvob bsp:
http://www.bendarling.net/downloads/sho ... klzvob.bsp
Benjamin Darling
http://www.bendarling.net/

Reflex - In development competitive arena fps combining modern tech with the speed, precision and freedom of 90's shooters.
http://www.reflexfps.net/
Team Xlink
Posts: 368
Joined: Thu Jun 25, 2009 4:45 am
Location: Michigan

Post by Team Xlink »

Amazing Work!

That is incredible!
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