I have had some people asking me what I have been scheming lately which in honest hasn’t been much. The weather here in Michigan has been finally nice for a change so I have been spending most of my free time cycling. However, I did go out last weekend and finally bought the fabulous Gang of Four book Design Patterns to add to my library. I know enough C++, JAVA, and Smalltalk to decipher the examples and apply it to whatever language I might be using these days (which has been lots of AS3, haXe, C#, and Unity3D). I also decided to join the tablet bandwagon and added a Wacom Bamboo to my collection in hopes that it will inspire me to work on my art portfolio that I have been neglecting. The surface really feels (and sounds) like you are drawing on paper!

In the next coming weeks I will be working on FlashMVC to do some cleanup and perhaps add more examples to the repository.
Lastly, I have been experimenting on AI development with local unit world data deresolution and querying. Such a system I am building will allow NPCs to explore large environments while meta tagging locations of interests for latter lookups. Usually this isn’t as complicated as the process I am developing, but I have to design something that is agile and performs well in the Flash player environment. I will blog more about this soon most likely.

O, and thank you to the people who came to my lecture on design patterns last week! I hope everyone was able to walk away with some practical knowledge to apply to their own projects. There is a good chance that I might continue this lecture in the future to dive deeper into a variety of AS3-applicable development pattens. The video camera we had in the room had some issues (we lost the second half of the lecture), but I hope to get the recording compressed and posted here soon.

After reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, I was impressed by the conjecture of the book (it has since been awarded several scientific awards), and I thought I would share here some musings I had after finishing it. The core ideology of the book is Reductionism which describes using simple programs to explain and reproduce complex systems that occur both in the virtual and physical world. As listed in the book, the definition of a “simple problem” is as follows:

1. Its operation can be completely explained by a simple graphical illustration.
2. It can be completely explained in a few sentences of human language.
3. It can be implemented in a computer language using just a few lines of code.
4. The number of its possible variations is small enough so that all of them can be computed.

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I have been musing about the best practical way for giving NPCs (non player characters) a clear set of directives for living in its environment using simple AI logic. Based on the notion that any character’s environment is dynamic, en-queuing a character’s broad set of daily actions seems impractical. Instead, it would seem more logical that a NPC is assigned a range of actions they are able or willing to perform and given a rule on when they are ‘prone’ to each action based on different weights. For example, instead of having a NPC eat exactly three times a day, the NPC would have a hunger counter and when the value reached so high- they would seek out food. This would allow a higher dynamic range of actions for the character as they could eat more or less during the day based on things like how much physical activity they where doing or if they ate something that reduced their hunger for the next meal.

Tags: theory

I programmed these examples several years ago… I’ll edit this blog to explain more but JADRAD is rather impressive for a newbie start in game programming at the time.

This is an RPG engine I programmed using C++ libs and BlitzMax. It is all hand-made as I was doing it for learning purposes. This includes graphics engine, AI, pathfinding, rpg system, map system, and more.
JADRAD RPG Engine (ZIP – 3megs)

On the flip-side, here is another very very simple AI test for swarming:
AIants (ZIP – 600k)

This is a carry-over post from my last blog and is ages old.

This application was created from scratch (without any 3rd party libraries) for a speed ActionScript 3 programming challenge. At the time, I have used AS2 but wanted to write this to see how well AS3 can utilize
advanced class constructs and other methods found in today’s mature OOP languages.

It was great fun to write, and it truly illustrates the speed boost AS3 delivers!
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Tags: AI, flash