Visualization tool for gaming artificial intelligence

• Main Author: Neo, Eric Jia Rong
• Other Authors: Ong Yew Soon
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Artificial intelligence
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48836
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Real time strategy game is one of the hardest types of game a code for artificial intelligence. Thus, most of the artificial intelligence in commercial RTS games would be hard coded by scripting. There are a few problems in doing this. After implementation of the scripted AI in a RTS game, experts would still have to test and tweak the rules in the game. Also, after completion, the implementation could not be applied in other RTS games again which means scripting would have to be done from scratch again. Thus, lot of time is wasted in coding artificial intelligence in commercial RTS games. Thus, in this project, a system was developed in order to ensure artificial intelligence is coded easily. The system uses rule based intelligence as it is the easiest to implement and understand. For rule based intelligence, there are two components, knowledge base and inference engine. The knowledge base is handled by Rule Designer, a generic rule editor. This program is designed to require minimum typing, thus syntax mistakes would not happen as compared to coding it directly. Also, Rule Designer is designed such that any game could use this program to code their agents’ rule based intelligence. MemeWar, an Artificial Intelligence simulation project that is developed by the C2i lab, acts as the inference engine for this project. As it was not easy to test out artificial intelligence in the current system, a new mode called Sandbox Mode was created in order make testing artificial intelligence easier. Also, a new module called Power Up was created to give the agent more choices and make the game more complex. Thus, by using this system, it is now easier to code artificial intelligence for RTS games.