The most recent part in the series.
I immediately jumped into the Architecture section and found 2 gems already. Sergio Garces’ “Flexible Object-Composition Architecture” is a more or less exact description of the method we’ve been using for Quest3D programming since a few years already (introduced to us by Ronald Jones). So it’s reassuring to read an expert’s opinion on this.
And Elizabeth Gordon’s description of behaviours as ordered lists of rules in “A Goal-Based, Multitasking Agent Architecture” is very inspiring.
“A behavior is a list of rules for achieving a goal, where each rule consists of a condition and then one or more actions to be executed if the condition is satisfied. The rules are evaluated in order from top to bottom during each game loop, and the first rule that matches is executed. The ordering of the rules should be such that the first step in the behavior is at the bottom, the second step is just above that, and so on, with the topmost rule checking whether the goal has been successfully achieved. When read from bottom to top, the rules shold thus form a complete plan. It should be clear that this structure is essentially a function containing only an if-then statement. (…) A behavior encoded in this way gives game characters important flexibility: if an action fails, the character will simply try again. If the chaacter can no longer perform the action, it will drop down to an earlier step in the plan, and if a step can be skipped, the character will skip it automatically.”
Beautiful… Elegant… Let’s steal it! 👿
Posted on June 28, 2006 at 4:06 pm
[…] Originally we had planned to re-use the Action List system that we had developed for 8 but reading Elizabeth Gordon’s article about behaviours as lists of rules has made us reconsider. […]