We thought we'd show you something Liam has been working on recently. In this video, you can see an AI routine deciding how to dig out an underground nest!
The AI ant colony that Liam has been coding (which will be used in future campaign levels, and quite possibly in an as-yet unconfirmed Skirmish mode) can now make decisions about how it goes about building its nest. The flashing colors represent it searching for areas where it can dig out hexagon-shaped rooms whilst also searching for places to build paths. It tries to keep the paths separate from the rooms for ant traffic efficiency.
In the current campaign level 2.2 "Queen of the Hill", the player faces off against 2 rival colonies. These have only extremely basic AI that is based on scripting, but we loved the idea of confronting a computer-controlled opponent that can come to decisions intelligently and genuinely try to beat you!
The way it's been set up, it's highly unlikely that the AI will come to the same nest design on any two given play-throughs - so each time you play a level, the computer will dig out its nest differently!
The AI ant colony that Liam has been coding (which will be used in future campaign levels, and quite possibly in an as-yet unconfirmed Skirmish mode) can now make decisions about how it goes about building its nest. The flashing colors represent it searching for areas where it can dig out hexagon-shaped rooms whilst also searching for places to build paths. It tries to keep the paths separate from the rooms for ant traffic efficiency.
In the current campaign level 2.2 "Queen of the Hill", the player faces off against 2 rival colonies. These have only extremely basic AI that is based on scripting, but we loved the idea of confronting a computer-controlled opponent that can come to decisions intelligently and genuinely try to beat you!
The way it's been set up, it's highly unlikely that the AI will come to the same nest design on any two given play-throughs - so each time you play a level, the computer will dig out its nest differently!
HTML:
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