Adlerschluss 3D - AI Demo

[bbence]

Adlerschluss 3D - AI Demo



This is the second AI demo from me, but this is different from the previous one. That previous AI was very limited and it was in fact just a small experiment, my first real attempt to program an AI using finite state machines. Realizing that it won't suffice, I have rewritten the AI core from scratch. And this AI demo is the result. It's still using FSM, as it's the best (or easiest) approach avaible for FPS games. And this AI demo still uses AI nodes for pathfinding (this is of course not a suprise, virtually all FPS games use nodes, or waypoints for bot navigation), still deterministic (although this is not very visible IMHO). It's still not perfect, mind you! There is certainly room for improvement, for example the bots don't always "avoid" each other and occasionally they go through each other, or even stand on almost the same location. And they don't check if there's another bot in front of them when they shoot. And there is many fine-tuning aspects that still need sorting out. But I wanted to share this with you in hope that it may be useful to some people. The AI code now is heavily commented (each sub that is, not line by line), so it may make it more understandable. But let me know if you have questions, suggestions or if you feel something is working wrong (or not at all). Oh yeah, you can kill them but they can't kill you at the moment, so its not programmed right now.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the code (click the link or it won't work):
http://bbence.atw.hu/Adler3D_AIDemo_Ver05.rar (5,77MB)
(let me know if this server does not work for you, it's possible that this server works only inland, don't ask me why)

Installation: just extract the archive, and put bass.dll into your windows/system folder. It does NOT need registering.

[Trashcan]

doesnt work

[RiddleMaster]

worked for me, its downloading right now

ill post again when ive messed with it

[Squeegy]

it downloaded about 100K and then stopped.  :/

[RiddleMaster]

ok, it kinda works, I can get around 650KB then it ends my download

[TechyZack]

I finally got it downloaded, I put it up on my server here. Hope that helps.

Zack

[houde]

thanks Zack because his link was very slow (4k/s), yours is a lil better (26k/s)

[houde]

well i don't know why but the mouse movement are very buggy. Sometimes I can't turn left/right/up/down or i'm locked looking in the air. dunno if it's only me.

[Trashcan]

Textures are all white. Nice music though

[houde]

hahaha
everyone has a different problem?

[RiddleMaster]

LOL
on mine all the textures are white amd the mouse gets stuck

But I did like the loading screen,  

[Zaknafein]

Nice models, environment, I guess the AI is pretty well done, but the mouse movement is utterly frustrating and buggy.... and hard to test anything just because of that.
I found it was pretty slow on my 800mHz thunderbird w/ geforce3 ti200 and 512mb ram PC100, too...

[tweakbox]

Yea, all I'm getting is white textures too

[houde]

what the hell... i see the textures and zaknafein too
everyone else doesn't seem to see them.

[bbence]

OMG!  
Well, since the dowloading problem is resolved, I will talk about the other errors...

1. Yeah, I have noticed the buggy mouse movement on some machines, it's really strange though. On a slower video card, it's OK. On my video card, it's buggy (I have a 64MB card). But if you manage to move around the level, it somewhat loads things in memory and then finally the mouse will "behave" normally. I really don't know what's cousing it, cos everything is preloaded. So I'm not really sure. It's the BSP that's causing it, cos if I start with BSP rendering disabled (TV will still check for collison so the AI would work, just the BSP is invisible), this mouse jerkyness is gone, and I can move around smoothly. So I'm clueless right now on this one.

2. Missing textures. Yes, this is the other very frustrating error. I've succesfully traced down the problem to the regional settings of windows. It must be that different countrys handle number decimals differently (in one country it's a "," , and others it's a "."). So if you change your regional settings in windows to something like Germany, I think it'll work (as far as I know, in Germany it's ","). This bug is caused by my loading rutines, I'm loading all level information from an .ini file, and in this file I use "," as decimal separator. Don't really know why does this affect textures, though, but it seems that if I change it to American English for example, this texture disappearing error comes right up, but changing back to normal (for me it's Hungary), it works.


Please let me know if the above problems are solved by changing regional settings and if after moving around for a while, the mouse jerkyness goes away.

Thanks for your responses by the way, it seems this demo has rather become a troubleshooting/testing demo for me, but it's just as good, so I'm not worrying.

EDIT2: on the next page there's a modified version of the level, that probably solves the mouse jerkyness problem.

[Trashcan]

Yay, setting regional settings to hungarian fixed it
Good job looks like you have a nice engine going there.
Keep up the good work

[bbence]

Yay, setting regional settings to hungarian fixed it
Good job looks like you have a nice engine going there.
Keep up the good work

Thanks! Glad that this is indeed the problem, now I need to find a way to make this .ini loading internationally compatible. Not good if parts of the world (well, where "." is the decimal separator) can't use the game. Not if I'm planning a big international release, but it's good to sort such things out.

[bbence]

NOTE: looks like the BSP lightmapping is causing this mouse thingy. Because even if I don't load textures (so the walls will be white), it's still wrong. So my educated guess is that the lightmaps are for some reason don't load into memory all at once... I'm recompiling this map without lightmaps and see if this makes any difference.

BTW: you can switch to fullscreen by changing a line in config.ini:

Change

Code:

InitWindowed=True

to

Code:

InitWindowed=False

and also change

Code:

ScreenWidth=1280
ScreenHeight=1024
ScreenBPP=16

if you want a lower (or higher) resolution.

[bbence]

Just as I suspected: the mouse jerkyness is caused by the lightmaps. So if I don't have them in my BSP level, it works smoothly. This probably means - as I've written before - that these lightmaps are not loaded in the memory when the BSP is loaded, just after they're needed. Strange. Anyway, I've uploaded a modified level, now without ligthamps. It should work now... Let me know if it indeed does. Thanks!

http://www.winnet.hu/map01.rar

[darqSHADOW]

About the regional settings, we've noticed that ourselves w/ ShaderBoy's XML files, too.  Sylvain and Arli's machines use ; as a seperator, while mine uses , -- we will be looking for a solution to this shortly.

DS