Integrating Rule-Based AI Tools into Mainstream Game Development

Abstract

Rule-based declarative formalisms enjoy several advantages when compared with imperative solutions, especially when dealing with AI-based application development: solid theoretical bases, no need for algorithm design or coding, explicit and easily modifiable knowledge bases, executable declarative specifications, fast prototyping, quick error detection, modularity. For these reasons, ways for combining declarative paradigms, such as Answer Set Programming (ASP), with traditional ones have been significantly studied in the recent years; there are however relevant contexts, in which this road is unexplored, such as development of real-time games. In such a setting, the strict requirements on reaction times, the presence of computer-human interactivity and a generally increased impedance between the two development paradigms make the task nontrivial. In this work we illustrate how to embed rule-based reasoning modules into the well-known Unity game development engine. To this end, we present an extension of EmbASP, a framework to ease the integration of declarative formalisms with generic applications. We prove the viability of our approach by developing a proof-of-concept Unity game that makes use of ASP-based AI modules.