Re: [TuxKart-devel] Ideas for AI

[Charles G. <ch...@ve...>]

On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 17:44 -0500, Steve Baker wrote:
> The ideal thing would be for the outputs of the AI to be identical
> to the inputs that the player provides via his controls.  That way
> the same physics apply to AI and players.

Ooo yes, I like that approach.

> However, it may be that we can make life easier for the AI code by
> providing a different interface - or even allowing it to cheat by
> going in at a lower level than the player's inputs.

The notion of the AI cheating isn't the greatest feeling for a player.
But it is a common approach in many games to add more challenge - to let
the AI cheat rather than play well.  Personally, I feel that it takes
away from the game.  I hate, for example, in Civ2 (and most likely
Freeciv) on the harder difficulties the AI makes more money and gets
more resources than you.  It's not good, it makes decisions as bad as on
lesser difficulties settings, it just gets to cheat.

> >   Value map:
> >   All points of interest on the map have a value associated with them,
> >   these values radiate outwards and overlay on top of each other.
> 
> We'd need to write a tool to prepare that map.
> 
> RAM storage for it might be a problem if it has to be held at high
> resolution for a large track.
> 
> If you'd like a 5 lap race to last 5 minutes with average speeds of
> 60mph (reasonable for a GoKart) - then the course has to be a mile
> long.  That could mean that the 'interest map' could easily need to
> be (say) 1000 meters on a side...I'd guess your map would need to be
> about 1 meter resolution?  So we'll be eating about a megabyte
> for every byte we store in the map.  On lower end systems, that
> could become a problem.
> 
> If you only need a couple of bytes per location on the map, that
> might not matter - but if you needed a dozen bytes per location,
> the storage could kill us.

Each location would surely just be a point on the map.  Scale and size
really shouldn't matter.  Put your thinking cap on Steve. ;)  That was a
very knee-jerk bit of reasoning on how you'd approach it.
-- 
- Charlie

Charles Goodwin <ch...@ve...>
Online @ www.charlietech.com