Abstract
Recently, the complexity of modern, real-time computer games has increased drastically. The need for sophisticated game AI, in particular for Non-Player Characters, grows with the demand for realistic games. Writing consistent, re-useable and efficient AI code has become hard. We demonstrate how modeling game AI at an appropriate abstraction level using an appropriate modeling language has many advantages. A variant of Rhapsody Statecharts is proposed as an appropriate formalism. The Tank Wars game by Electronic Arts (EA) is used to demonstrate our concrete approach. We show how the use of the Statecharts formalism leads quite naturally to layered modeling of game AI and allows modelers to abstract away from choices between, for example, time-slicing and discrete-event time management. Finally, our custom tools are used to synthesize efficient C++ code to insert into the Tank Wars main game loop.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
de Lara, J., Vangheluwe, H., Alfonseca, M.: Meta-modelling and graph grammars for multi-paradigm modelling in AToM3. Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) 3(3), 194–209 (2004)
Electronic Arts. EA Tank Wars (2005), http://www.info.ea.com/company/company-tw.php
Fu, D., Houlette, R.T.: Putting AI in entertainment: An AI authoring tool for simulation and games. IEEE Intelligent Systems 17(4), 81–84 (2002)
Gill, S.: Visual Finite State Machine AI Systems. Gamasutra (November 2004), http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041118/gill-01.shtml
Harel, D., Kugler, H.: The rhapsody semantics of statecharts (or, on the executable core of the UML). In: Ehrig, H., Damm, W., Desel, J., Große-Rhode, M., Reif, W., Schnieder, E., Westkämper, E. (eds.) INT 2004. LNCS, vol. 3147, pp. 325–354. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Newborn, M.: Deep blue’s contribution to AI. Ann. Math. Artif. Intell. 28(1-4), 27–30 (2000)
Onuczko, C., Cutumisu, M., Szafron, D., Schaeffer, J., McNaughton, M., Roy, T., Waugh, K., Carbonaro, M., Siegel, J.: A Pattern Catalog For Computer Role Playing Games. In: Game-On-NA 2005 - 1st International North American Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation, pp. 33–38. Eurosis (August 2005)
Pickett, C.J.F., Verbrugge, C., Martineau, F.: (P)NFG: A Language and Runtime System for STructured Computer Narratives. In: Game-On-NA 2005 - 1st International North American Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation, pp. 23–32. Eurosis (August 2005)
Unreal Technology. The Unreal Engine 3 (2007), http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kienzle, J., Denault, A., Vangheluwe, H. (2007). Model-Based Design of Computer-Controlled Game Character Behavior. In: Engels, G., Opdyke, B., Schmidt, D.C., Weil, F. (eds) Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. MODELS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4735. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75209-7_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75209-7_44
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75208-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75209-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)