I am getting into AI and am doing a project for uni about army tactics. I need to demonstrate army posistioning. I need some sprites to represent the soldiers. I am realising that no-one will do them for me and there isn't much chance of me finsing what I want on the web so I have to do it my self. is there any simple way of representing a soldier e.g. attacking, having a shield up, walking, running etc.? what is my best solution??? thanks for looking

A lot of AI projects just use squares to represent entities and then you can use different colors to represent different states.

HTH!

Well, I think that stick figures with color can do wonders for demo or prototyping purposes :)
And they're pretty easy to draw and even animate.

Colors and letters can work, too, I used that myself.

Quote: Original post by Ultimate_Fusion

is there any simple way of representing a soldier e.g. attacking, having a shield up, walking, running etc.?

what is my best solution???


thanks for looking

Well, I guess you could represent all soldiers as circles, and show the state of the circle through it's colors. So, say, light green through dark green represents the speed, a red outline represents attacking and a blue outline represents defending.

But really, you can't spend twenty minutes creating four tiny jpgs representing your states? I'm not sure why that would present a difficulty. It's not like they need to swing their legs.

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I guess Programmer16 got there before me. Shouldn't take five minutes off in the middle of a post...

I can probs do circles but I would like it to look better than a 5 year-old drew since the AI and coding is degree standard.

The people marking it will probably prefer plain shapes to 'art' providing they can determine what is what. Ideas include colours, geometric shapes, numbers, shading patterns, small text labels below the unit (with a legend at the side of the screen if necessary), and small icon overlays (eg. sword for attacking, a shield for defending).

If this is intended for a medieval game, you can also take the sprites from wesnoth (www.wesnoth.org) which are open source and free to use in a non-commercial project. Once you become commercial, you'll have to switch tho...

You can see some units there :
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wesnoth_units
But there are many more in the sources tarball.

A slightly more expressive variant of coloured squares could be an isosceles triangle (to show facing) with a line pointing outwards in a contrasting colour to show weapon aim.
Ground vehicles can be rectangles with a pointed front side, in different sizes and their weapons also drawn as sticks.
Shields can be another line; walking or running status should be apparent from motion, and can be underlined with colours.
You could additionally stick a letter, digit or other symbol in the middle of the units if they are large enough.

hi, Ultimate_Fusion,

i am doing a little platoon level tactic game myself.
i think you could use a circle and a line for facing direction
for the soldier.

i am using a triangle, because it give me more possibility
to define the soldier like rank or what he is doing.

here is a screen shot.
http://www.cip.ifi.lmu.de/~suncu/symbol.png

btw, i am pretty interested in your project, care to
tell me about it? :)

any way, good luck in your project.