[gameprogrammer] Re: My game

On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 23:13 -0400, Mike Gillissie wrote:
> I've been fascinated by AI especially over the past year, and have been 
> preparing to do a lot of AI work (at a newbie level) in my own game - 
> nothing physics-oriented, and nothing that will break my brain too badly, 
> but adding some "thinks" to my game is what I'm looking forward to the 
> most...
> 
> I think what a lot of people don't understand is how little writing games is 
> like playing games... ;)

No truer words were ever spoken. I teac

> 
> Thanks for sharing, sir! :)
> -Mike
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kevin Jenkins" <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 8:57 PM
> Subject: [gameprogrammer] Re: My game
> 
> 
> > Evan Stone wrote:
> >>>I'd love to hear more about your AI - what sorts of things you had to 
> >>>work
> >>>on...
> >
> > Getting Up is the largest game I've worked on.  It's about 20 million 
> > lines of code with about 50 people working on it.
> >
> > As a result, most of what I did was read code and fix bugs written by my 
> > predecessor or in other systems.  This is unavoidable when you have that 
> > much code and that many people.  Nobody understands an entire system and 
> > not a single person who wrote any of the original systems still works at 
> > the company, which is not unusual in large companies.
> >
> > Getting Up has a lot of what we call "Special Navigation" in it, such as 
> > climbing ladders, going across balance beams, climbing walls.  A lot of my 
> > time was spent working out how to get through these things, which can be 
> > very complicated in some cases.  For example, we support jumping from a 
> > ladder to a pipe to a balance beam to balancing up to a wall climb. Every 
> > one of these situations needs custom code.
> >
> > Special navigation relies on physics for correctly detecting the 
> > navigation, level design for correctly implementing the meshes and 
> > pathnodes, and script for correctly interpreting AI commands.  Because of 
> > the high degree of interdependency I had to know all of those systems well 
> > enough to debug any of them.
> >
> > I think when most people think of AI they think of the visible parts of 
> > what you see in the game, such as which attacks enemies throw and when 
> > they block.  But actually that is mostly script.  The AI programmer 
> > provides the framework and it's up to others to provide the details that 
> > the player sees.
> >
> > The AI programmer is very important because he deals with many systems and 
> > is the go-to man when people have problems.  But the job isn't all that 
> > exciting, or at least not for me.  Mostly I just fix bugs and tell level 
> > designers or scripters what they did wrong when something doesn't work.
> >
> >
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> >
> > 
> 
> 
> 
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