Tactical AI Kit (finally) Released for Torque 3D 1.2!
by Bryce · 02/16/2012 (11:04 pm) · 22 comments
...
Three months.
Three months since Torque 3D 1.2 was released, and I failed to bring you kind folks a Tactical AI Kit update. Welp, I'm an awful person.
My deepest apologies aside, I hereby announce the newest release of the AI addition you know and love, TAIK for Torque 3D 1.2. Everything's ported over, packed up, and ready to spend some one-on-one time with you.
Anyone who has played any sort of shooter-themed game has experienced bad AI. AI doing stupid things, AI that simply stands in place and lands perfect headshots on you. Cheating AI, magically knowing exactly where you are when they shouldn't. Bad AI can turn a potentially fun game into an annoying experience.
Inspired by my hatred of terrible games everywhere, the Tactical AI Kit was built to create a dynamic AI system for shooter-type games. Instead of resorting to lazy cheating, the default behaviors revolve around being intellectually equal to the player. When they are spawned, their job is to survive.
Tactical AI Players are capable of reacting to a number of different stimuli: finding bodies, hearing shots, noticing nearby bullet impacts, annoyances (car alarms, various distractions), suspicious movement, explosions, and of course, seeing enemies. Cheating does not happen. Shooting at an AI Player will not instantly give away your exact position, like with many AI implementations in other games. Instead, they'll deal with finding the attacker later, and either get to cover or get out of there! The key is self-preservation. They don't want to die!
No standing around in the open and shooting mindlessly. TAI Players will actively seek cover, peeking out and hiding to attack safely. The reaction behaviors are dynamic and randomized, making their positions and decisions unpredictable. Being fully dynamic, the player can either go through a level guns blazing, or sneak around and avoid alerting their enemies. Fine tuned and tested, they can perform in many different situations; they'll perform just as well in the tight corridors of a building as they will in a massive outdoors level. The unpredictability will drastically increase the replay value of your game.
Being built on a relatively slow computer, performance and smooth framerates were constantly kept in mind. By effectively using respawning and a zoned AI Manager, you can even create missions with over one hundred managed TAI Players.
The Tactical AI Kit is 100% multiplayer compatible, and you can customize it by adding or changing "brain" types and new behavior states.
Bottom line: the Tactical AI Kit is a feature-packed, smart, and realistic AI solution, providing a fair challenge that will get your players wanting more, and most importantly, having fun!
Given that, here's a small major feature list lazily copy/pasted from my previous blog:
Throwing grenades - Uses a clever little ballistics function to know how to toss grenades to flush out an enemy behind cover. Works on targets both above and below the thrower.
Patrol paths - You can set up paths for the AI to follow while they're idle/non-alert. Think of a guard patrolling his post, forcing an intruding player to time his/her movements.
A zoned AI manager - This saves performance by deactivating AI Players that aren't a part of gameplay. This stops them from performing think cycles and culls them from rendering. In linear levels, AI Zone triggers are placed by the developer. In non-linear levels (big, open sandbox areas where zones would be useless), they are deactivated by the level's visibility distance.
Cover searching - TAIPlayers love nothing more than attacking targets from cover. They'll hide behind their cover to "reload" (after using their weapons maximum number of shots), and pop out to shoot back. They will suppress the last known enemy position while attempting to flush them out with grenades, and if they come under fire, they become "pinned down" and are forced to hide behind cover.
Advanced senses - You can specify the overall color of the mission (e.g. an arctic mission would be some sort of blue/white, a night mission would be black, a desert mission may be light brown, etc.) and the overall color of your player datablocks. Players that "blend in" with their mission become harder to spot by TAIPlayers. Hiding in foliage will also lower their chances of being seen.
...and much more!
With pleasure, citizen! What a better way to do this than by downloading a demo game?
It's a relatively old demo, built with TGE 1.5.2 (my apologies...), but the AI system is identical, so you'll get an accurate, playable demonstration of how Tactical AI Players behave in something that resembles a game. Slightly addicting, watch out for that.
Quick disclaimer: The Tactical AI Kit does not come with any of the artwork you see in the demo. This demo is simply my AI dropped into my own personal project. Buying the Tactical AI Kit will give you the AI scripts, engine modifications, a very basic test mission, an example character model with required animations, a simple weapon model with reaction hooks, and not much other than that. Please don't all-caps email me about how "plant_fern001.dts" was not included in your artificial intelligence download.
If you are already an owner of TAIK for the following engines:
Torque 3D Beta 2/3
Torque 3D 1.0.1
Torque 3D 1.1 Preview
Torque 3D 1.1
...then your upgrade to TAIK for Torque 3D 1.2 is free! Email me now if you haven't received an upgrade message from me already, and I'll shoot you a download link.
TAIK for Torque Game Engine 1.5
TAIK for Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.7.1
TAIK for Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.8.2
My email address is in my profile if you've got any questions or flattering compliments. Thank you all for keeping TAIK alive (even in the short little bursts that it decides to poke its head out into the light...)! I'll be celebrating TAIK's first birthday on the 22nd of this month.
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Growing tired of building games with TGE on a computer that rolls at a blazing 10 frames per second, I finally bought myself an HP DV6 laptop, which I would highly recommend to anyone who needs some portable gaming power. Ever since she arrived in the mail, I've been stuck on porting everything from "old Torque" -- players, weapons, gameplay mechanics, engine modifications, everything -- into Torque 3D. Porting was my worst development experience of all time, but with that finally done, I could finally rest easy, and then maybe get TAIK 1.2 out the door. So, I did.
What I'm trying to say right now is that Torque 3D is the most amazing thing. Playing around with the material system, all the pretty new editors, breakable physics stuff, and finally ditching Constructor+map2dif, has all been a blast.
I recently started using Blender to build my levels. Once I finally learned it and got past all the complications and strange workflow, I started going from "BLENDER IS TERRIBLE" to "BLENDER IS NICE." Loop cuts, edge extruding, lightmap baking, and all that jazz. This is going to be my procrastination go-to for a long time.
Anyway, here's some of my happiness.
I'm bad at blog conclusions. This'll have to do. Be sure to help me pay for gas / unhealthy amounts of pizza by picking up your very own copy of TAIK!
Three months.
Three months since Torque 3D 1.2 was released, and I failed to bring you kind folks a Tactical AI Kit update. Welp, I'm an awful person.
My deepest apologies aside, I hereby announce the newest release of the AI addition you know and love, TAIK for Torque 3D 1.2. Everything's ported over, packed up, and ready to spend some one-on-one time with you.
Bryce, these acronyms are unfamiliar to my senses. What is TAIK?
What a fantastic question, young lad. If you haven't been paying any attention to my previous three-year spree of "the AI Kit will be released eventually" blogs, followed by random progress reports of some sort of game-thing I'm building, you might not have any idea what I'm talking about. Simply put: Torque does not ship with any elaborate artificial intelligence system. You're given some basic AI functions and are then encouraged to build a multiplayer game.Anyone who has played any sort of shooter-themed game has experienced bad AI. AI doing stupid things, AI that simply stands in place and lands perfect headshots on you. Cheating AI, magically knowing exactly where you are when they shouldn't. Bad AI can turn a potentially fun game into an annoying experience.
Inspired by my hatred of terrible games everywhere, the Tactical AI Kit was built to create a dynamic AI system for shooter-type games. Instead of resorting to lazy cheating, the default behaviors revolve around being intellectually equal to the player. When they are spawned, their job is to survive.
Tactical AI Players are capable of reacting to a number of different stimuli: finding bodies, hearing shots, noticing nearby bullet impacts, annoyances (car alarms, various distractions), suspicious movement, explosions, and of course, seeing enemies. Cheating does not happen. Shooting at an AI Player will not instantly give away your exact position, like with many AI implementations in other games. Instead, they'll deal with finding the attacker later, and either get to cover or get out of there! The key is self-preservation. They don't want to die!
No standing around in the open and shooting mindlessly. TAI Players will actively seek cover, peeking out and hiding to attack safely. The reaction behaviors are dynamic and randomized, making their positions and decisions unpredictable. Being fully dynamic, the player can either go through a level guns blazing, or sneak around and avoid alerting their enemies. Fine tuned and tested, they can perform in many different situations; they'll perform just as well in the tight corridors of a building as they will in a massive outdoors level. The unpredictability will drastically increase the replay value of your game.
Being built on a relatively slow computer, performance and smooth framerates were constantly kept in mind. By effectively using respawning and a zoned AI Manager, you can even create missions with over one hundred managed TAI Players.
The Tactical AI Kit is 100% multiplayer compatible, and you can customize it by adding or changing "brain" types and new behavior states.
Bottom line: the Tactical AI Kit is a feature-packed, smart, and realistic AI solution, providing a fair challenge that will get your players wanting more, and most importantly, having fun!
Given that, here's a small major feature list lazily copy/pasted from my previous blog:
Features include:
Squad support - Can be led by a human player, who can give move, hold, and regroup orders. Alternatively, an AI leader can be given an objective to get their squad to. With an AI leader, the members will cover one another and clear rooms ahead of the leader.Throwing grenades - Uses a clever little ballistics function to know how to toss grenades to flush out an enemy behind cover. Works on targets both above and below the thrower.
Patrol paths - You can set up paths for the AI to follow while they're idle/non-alert. Think of a guard patrolling his post, forcing an intruding player to time his/her movements.
A zoned AI manager - This saves performance by deactivating AI Players that aren't a part of gameplay. This stops them from performing think cycles and culls them from rendering. In linear levels, AI Zone triggers are placed by the developer. In non-linear levels (big, open sandbox areas where zones would be useless), they are deactivated by the level's visibility distance.
Cover searching - TAIPlayers love nothing more than attacking targets from cover. They'll hide behind their cover to "reload" (after using their weapons maximum number of shots), and pop out to shoot back. They will suppress the last known enemy position while attempting to flush them out with grenades, and if they come under fire, they become "pinned down" and are forced to hide behind cover.
Advanced senses - You can specify the overall color of the mission (e.g. an arctic mission would be some sort of blue/white, a night mission would be black, a desert mission may be light brown, etc.) and the overall color of your player datablocks. Players that "blend in" with their mission become harder to spot by TAIPlayers. Hiding in foliage will also lower their chances of being seen.
...and much more!
Gee I dunno. I'd consider it if you had some sort of demo that I could try out first, to see how it all works.
With pleasure, citizen! What a better way to do this than by downloading a demo game?
It's a relatively old demo, built with TGE 1.5.2 (my apologies...), but the AI system is identical, so you'll get an accurate, playable demonstration of how Tactical AI Players behave in something that resembles a game. Slightly addicting, watch out for that.
Quick disclaimer: The Tactical AI Kit does not come with any of the artwork you see in the demo. This demo is simply my AI dropped into my own personal project. Buying the Tactical AI Kit will give you the AI scripts, engine modifications, a very basic test mission, an example character model with required animations, a simple weapon model with reaction hooks, and not much other than that. Please don't all-caps email me about how "plant_fern001.dts" was not included in your artificial intelligence download.
Well now that's the cat's pajamas. How much will it cost?
A copy of the Tactical AI Kit for a first time user is $74.95I already own TAIK for a version of Torque 3D. You said the upgrade's free, right?
Correct!If you are already an owner of TAIK for the following engines:
Torque 3D Beta 2/3
Torque 3D 1.0.1
Torque 3D 1.1 Preview
Torque 3D 1.1
...then your upgrade to TAIK for Torque 3D 1.2 is free! Email me now if you haven't received an upgrade message from me already, and I'll shoot you a download link.
Does TAIK work with older versions of Torque?
Well shore. How about...TAIK for Torque Game Engine 1.5
TAIK for Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.7.1
TAIK for Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.8.2
Whatever man, where can I buy the kit?
Mosey on over to the HNGamers store and you're good to go. And now, for the obligatory huge store link:Purchase the Tactical AI Kit for Torque 3D 1.2 Here!
My email address is in my profile if you've got any questions or flattering compliments. Thank you all for keeping TAIK alive (even in the short little bursts that it decides to poke its head out into the light...)! I'll be celebrating TAIK's first birthday on the 22nd of this month.
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// End AI Blog
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Wow! After hearing all that, I would love for you to mindlessly spew out things about the wreck of a game you're working on.
Well of course you would!Growing tired of building games with TGE on a computer that rolls at a blazing 10 frames per second, I finally bought myself an HP DV6 laptop, which I would highly recommend to anyone who needs some portable gaming power. Ever since she arrived in the mail, I've been stuck on porting everything from "old Torque" -- players, weapons, gameplay mechanics, engine modifications, everything -- into Torque 3D. Porting was my worst development experience of all time, but with that finally done, I could finally rest easy, and then maybe get TAIK 1.2 out the door. So, I did.
What I'm trying to say right now is that Torque 3D is the most amazing thing. Playing around with the material system, all the pretty new editors, breakable physics stuff, and finally ditching Constructor+map2dif, has all been a blast.
I recently started using Blender to build my levels. Once I finally learned it and got past all the complications and strange workflow, I started going from "BLENDER IS TERRIBLE" to "BLENDER IS NICE." Loop cuts, edge extruding, lightmap baking, and all that jazz. This is going to be my procrastination go-to for a long time.
Anyway, here's some of my happiness.
I'm bad at blog conclusions. This'll have to do. Be sure to help me pay for gas / unhealthy amounts of pizza by picking up your very own copy of TAIK!
Buy the Tactical AI Kit for $74.95/free upgrade. It's good for the soul.
#22
I'm also putting this here to assure others who might experience the same problem that you are ready and willing to help.
All is well now on my side.
08/04/2015 (8:52 am)
Thank you, Bryce for supplying a working download link (and also for pointing me to that elusive video ;)I'm also putting this here to assure others who might experience the same problem that you are ready and willing to help.
All is well now on my side.
Dirk Hinzmann
I know I saw it (but foolishly, I did not download it), it seemed to have been an introductory scene to the Minneapolis Airport Demos.
And I'm still waiting for Bryce to respond since my download link is not there - see my previous post) - so, no ai*stuff yet.
If you were able to help me in THAT respect, I'd be more than thankful.