AI

Hey Pär,

AI is simply a way to apply realistic behaviors to objects in a convenient and automatic fashion.

Examples of AI are Maratis "Behaviors", brick-logic, path following, path finding, enemy behaviors (moving toward you, fighting....), animals that flee when you approach them...

Eplanatory examples can be found at http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/pandai/aitypes.html

Most of these behaviors involve multiple objects to interact between themselves, initiating a cascade of action-reaction chain (if A do this then B do that and then A reacts to B...)

The advantage of using AI is that you code the behavior once (ideally as a C++ plugin accessible in the Behavior panel in Maratis) and then you only have to set target objects in the editor and they will behave as expected.

So to make an AI system, the first step is to choose your desired behaviors,  write down the detailed chain of action-reaction and then start to code each of them!

From the dev roadmap, additional behaviors are planned (simple AI, ready-made player moving (3rd person, platform...)).
Hope to see them in a very near future as this kind of feature bring both infinite power and ease of use to the user.

Last edited by com3D (2013-04-28 17:46:00)

Yep
As com3d and pleedian have mentioned, the question is a bit vague. Following what pleedian mentioned, you can easily make fish AI.

For most* other AI  you will probably want pathfinding as a basis. You can find many great tutorials online about how to implement pathfinding (one picked at random). Once you can tell an object "go to X" and it finds its way without getting stuck on walls, then the fun begins.

Unfortunately there's no pathfinding support in Maratis yet. There's a great library which would add pretty much everything we could possibly need if we could get it integrated. Unfortunately I haven't got the time to do so right now. Maybe someone else might want to make a plugin? *hint hint*

Never heard of it, but I just looked it up. Looks pretty awesome, but it is pretty much a (nicer) wrapper around the existing AI functionality, so I don't think that we can (easily) just copy/paste their lua scripts into Maratis. On the other hand, it's BSD, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with anyone looking and getting "inspired" by their stuff for within Maratis.

quoted again because I'm getting back to the original question
State machines. Research. Learn. Love. Writing a state machine is incredibly easy. Maintaining it as it grows unfortunately is less so. Ideally, I'd like to be able to add a variable type to a behavior which opens up a custom window for manipulating the state machine associated with that behavior (I already have a prototype tool written in a 2D engine... (actually, that gives me a GREAT idea... I might run and do some testing on it in a bit))

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the situation I hope they were at least a little coherent

*Of course you could have basic AI that just moves in a straight line between waypoints which wouldn't need pathfinding, chess AI wouldn't need pathfinding, etc etc etc

Did you try importing in collada (dae) format?