Since some time, and you would know it if you have been following our blog, we are at the stage of working on WOF's AI since the basic gameplay mechanics are finally in place.
We had a first 'flirt with AI' iteration and posted videos of the results.
We are now at the second iteration which should already produce some useful fun-playable behavior. I decided to start with the goalie. after some coding and much thinking I came to the conclusion that I will probably have to include some AI 'experience' that the AI footballers' brains will be able to use.
The reasons for this are simple: without this, a goalie's brain would be running full steam the whole time trying to estimate and reestimate the same things. things that real life goalies know by 'experience' because when a footballer steps in the pitch ... he has years of playing experience and training behind him ... can this be simply discarded? well yes and no.
If we choose to give the footballers no experience, they will need much more processing power to compute potential ball positions after shots, potential shots to make, how dangerous a shot could be given the situation..... it's possible but both expensive in terms of processing power and therefore hurting game performance, too 'machinistic' in terms of precision ...
the footballer would be able to estimate to with exact precision if per example the goalie can catch a ball if it was shot in some way, but also and on a finer level probably too predictable for the human player who would then find a situation where he could score once and repeat it forever because the AI would never try to fix whatever went wrong with their estimation.
Now how on earth do we give our AI experience?
A neural network brain comes to mind ... a brain that knows nothing at first and is trained through a huge number of iterations until it has learned something... but nahhhh its too unpredictable, fragile, uncontrollable, unmoddable and is better left as an exercise to academics. the goal here is a fun game ...
I will try to use some time at load time, before the match starts, and use it to make the AI learn a bit about what shots can be made using the current match situation (ball paramters, pitch parameters, player characteristics) and they will then be able to use this as 'experience' and in a totally human way act based on approximations and even try to fine those approximations when they find they didn't work.
its more or less like sending the team to the pitch for a short training before the game, so that they get their brains in-tune with the match's parameters and so that u don't play against a totally 'unexperienced machine precise hard coded AI' team.
I hope it will work well. this might again take some time ... but it is a topic of huge importance!
so until the next vids, stay tuned!
We had a first 'flirt with AI' iteration and posted videos of the results.
We are now at the second iteration which should already produce some useful fun-playable behavior. I decided to start with the goalie. after some coding and much thinking I came to the conclusion that I will probably have to include some AI 'experience' that the AI footballers' brains will be able to use.
The reasons for this are simple: without this, a goalie's brain would be running full steam the whole time trying to estimate and reestimate the same things. things that real life goalies know by 'experience' because when a footballer steps in the pitch ... he has years of playing experience and training behind him ... can this be simply discarded? well yes and no.
If we choose to give the footballers no experience, they will need much more processing power to compute potential ball positions after shots, potential shots to make, how dangerous a shot could be given the situation..... it's possible but both expensive in terms of processing power and therefore hurting game performance, too 'machinistic' in terms of precision ...
the footballer would be able to estimate to with exact precision if per example the goalie can catch a ball if it was shot in some way, but also and on a finer level probably too predictable for the human player who would then find a situation where he could score once and repeat it forever because the AI would never try to fix whatever went wrong with their estimation.
Now how on earth do we give our AI experience?
A neural network brain comes to mind ... a brain that knows nothing at first and is trained through a huge number of iterations until it has learned something... but nahhhh its too unpredictable, fragile, uncontrollable, unmoddable and is better left as an exercise to academics. the goal here is a fun game ...
I will try to use some time at load time, before the match starts, and use it to make the AI learn a bit about what shots can be made using the current match situation (ball paramters, pitch parameters, player characteristics) and they will then be able to use this as 'experience' and in a totally human way act based on approximations and even try to fine those approximations when they find they didn't work.
its more or less like sending the team to the pitch for a short training before the game, so that they get their brains in-tune with the match's parameters and so that u don't play against a totally 'unexperienced machine precise hard coded AI' team.
I hope it will work well. this might again take some time ... but it is a topic of huge importance!
so until the next vids, stay tuned!