Wow, you quys respond quick! Thanks everyone for the interest.
On the demo front, I've got a couple of weeks off work at the end of July and my daughter is still in the nursery then (bliss) to I expect to make leaps and bounds and post the demo around then. I'll be sure to let everyone know.
It's probably an established technique, most things already are, but I've not read about it anywhere. If it is then it's probably called something like Temporary Dynamic Waypoints.
I've used a similar system before when writing Bots for Quake. I'd let lose a bunch of dumb "ants" in a level who'd drop waypoints when they went out of sight of the last one. As ants moved through an area they'd optimize the positions of the waypoints and increase and decrease the strength. So a waypoint at a dead end would be weak and one at a cross roads would be strong.
Once they'd been through and "mapped" a level the waypoints would be saved and the Bot could use them for navigating.
That was quite a while ago now, but I've always had an interest in autonomous agents with very simple rules combining to form a more complex result.
So doing Ant Attack was pretty much inevitable really.
On the demo front, I've got a couple of weeks off work at the end of July and my daughter is still in the nursery then (bliss) to I expect to make leaps and bounds and post the demo around then. I'll be sure to let everyone know.
Had a quick look at your blog and like the way you're doing the ant AI. Is this a well established technique or something you came up with? I haven't dabbled much in AI so I don't know.
It's probably an established technique, most things already are, but I've not read about it anywhere. If it is then it's probably called something like Temporary Dynamic Waypoints.
I've used a similar system before when writing Bots for Quake. I'd let lose a bunch of dumb "ants" in a level who'd drop waypoints when they went out of sight of the last one. As ants moved through an area they'd optimize the positions of the waypoints and increase and decrease the strength. So a waypoint at a dead end would be weak and one at a cross roads would be strong.
Once they'd been through and "mapped" a level the waypoints would be saved and the Bot could use them for navigating.
That was quite a while ago now, but I've always had an interest in autonomous agents with very simple rules combining to form a more complex result.
So doing Ant Attack was pretty much inevitable really.