August 2003
Intermediate to advanced
1008 pages
16h 46m
English
KEY TOPICS
AI Basics
Take Away Those Godlike Powers!
State Machines and Reacting
Probability Machines
Making Decisions
Patterns
Object Spawning
Putting It All Together
Evolution
Other Game AI Ideas
Summary
One of the first games I ever tried to make was a Pac-Man clone. It had 16 colors, was written in BASIC, ran on a 486, and flickered—a lot.
But the point is, my first attempt at making the ghosts move was a little bit off the mark. Whenever a ghost would have to decide which way to go, it would always move in the direction of the player. This essentially made “super-ghosts” that were so good at tracking Pac-Man down that he rarely had time to eat a power dot. But if he was lucky enough get to a power dot in time, all the ...
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