AI controls for Newtonian-physics space flight

Foxostro · 2005-09-18T15:51:07

I want to create an AI system to help the player in my latest project pilot a space craft that is forced to obey the laws of Newtonian physics: I have a craft of known mass and moment of inertia drifting in the vaccuum of space. It will have an arbitrary number of thrusters placed at any arbitrary location on the outer surface of the ship. Each thruster has a range of directions in which it can be oriented, but may not be oriented so as to fire into the ship's hull. My problem is control of this vehicle. There may be a dozen thruster assemblies on the surface of the player's ship, and that is far too much to force a person to keep track of. I want to design a system that can rotate the ship to any desired orientation so that the ship's engines may then push the ship to it's destination. Ideally, the player pulls back his joystick and this AI system will command the thrusters in such a manner as to pitch the ship up as best as it can. If each thruster could be oriented in any direction at all, even into the ship itself, I would accomplish this by calculating the torque needed to turn the ship where I want. But instead, I would like the player to face situations where thrusters are viable targets on eachother's ships. I want it to be possible to destroy indivual thrusters and hinder a ship's maneuverability. Making it impossible for an opponent player to pitch up, or stop a roll, for example. I was reading the "Dogfighting AI" thread to get some ideas for how I can do this. But the articles presented in this thread (namely "Creating a Dogfight Agent") are mainly concerned with modern airplanes that have elevators, airelons, and so on, that are not related to this problem. Also, I do not need to determine the proper maneuver to perform, this system is only acting as a semi-auto-pilot for the player. The best solution I could come up with was training a neural network to fire thrusters in order to keep the ship oriented properly. I don't really have any experience with neural nets, can they keep track of a large number of inputs? Such as yaw, pitch, throttle for 12-20ish thruster assemblies at a time? Would a neural network react quickly to the loss of a thruster assembly, or would the ship behave stranglely for a few minutes after a minor system was smeared on the hull by a passing asteroid? I would prefer a nice straight-forward system to netural nets too. I don't like the idea of an AI system that I can't easily debug :( Most importantly, neural networks seem like a very n00b-ish technology to ask about in these forums. I do NOT want to appear foolish, I'm just stumped :/ So I thought I's try polling GameDev for thoughts. You guys seem to have a lot of good ones. Thank you for the your time and patience!

Artificial Intelligence Programming

Started by Foxostro August 04, 2005 06:19 PM

33 comments, last by Jotaf 19 years, 5 months ago

Jotaf

280

September 18, 2005 03:51 PM

I guess you're right on everything you're saying :)
My method is a kind of a fusion of the 2 you're talking about. But those leave out a lot of artifacts that don't look much like a volumetric light.
Anyways, I just wanted to ask your opinion about this. I'm still going to keep developing it but mostly as a volumetric light, and not so focused on reproducing a thruster! Thanks.

AI controls for Newtonian-physics space flight

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AI controls for Newtonian-physics space flight

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