Dear all, Hi. im a new user. now that tha's out of the way, heres my dilema: I am currently in my final year studying Computer Science with Games Technology (City University, London). In the final year we have to do a project and so naturally games seemed the way to go. I had the following concept as a start point: Squad Tactics/Behaviour - Creating a squad of generic NPC's and making them interact so as not to do anything un-intelligetn, eg. shoot one another. I had thought of doing this using a simple 2D games engine and having each char simply represented, eg triangle, and from that create a set of genereic NPCs and a "squad" object, which would have access to the NPCs movement/action methods and its accessor methods (eg to get the poition of each NPC). And possibly from this have the squad object controlled by a "leader" NPC (or even human). The problem I am facing is that we are supposed to do sumething which hasn;t been explored too much and has beneficiaries, i.e. doing this when its been done a million times in better ways isn't really gona cut it. So i was looking for thoughts and suggestions. Thanks everyone. Murtaza PS please bear in mind my knowledge of games devellopment etc is stil very limited.. :)

Wow... create something that hasn't been done before? And has beneficiaries? That's hard...

You might want to implement a combination of popular 'AI'-tactics. Here's just a wild thought (bear with me on this one and correct me)

For squad movement you could implement some kind of flocking-behaviour:
- the squad leader would move towards the target using flocking
- the squad member would move towards the squad leader in the same mannor

At each point in time you could have an ANN control the actions each squad member has to take, say:
- duck
- shoot
- reload
- jump
- etc

These actions would of course be based on certain parameters (target in sight, low health, empty clip etc). You could then implement a GA to evolve the ANNs, by letting multiple squads (20 - 30) fight against eachother in a huge arena.

That being said, I'm sure these kind of NPC's would be creamed by the 'commercial' Q3-bots. But it's good fun though!

Hope this will give you some ideas.

Edo

You can find a lot of information about possible ways to implement squad tactics on CGF AI and in the book AI Game Programming Wisdom. There is also AI Game Programming Wisdom 2, but I haven't read it so I can't say whether or not it touches on the subject of squad tactics.

Thanks alot, both these posts were helpful.

I have got Games Programming Gems 1 ang 2, and AI Game Programming Wisdom 2, all have sections on AI, the latter has a section on squad based AI, the otehrs touch on it only.