On 02/01/2008, Dave Griffiths <dave_at_pawfal.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Some text from me about live coding and games, contains a brief history of
> livecoding (apologies for anyone I missed out) - and some stuff on
> programming games (i.e. games where programming is part of the
> gameplay)...
Very interesting and a fun read. Thanks!
Most of the examples of programming in games that have been mentioned on the
list so far have related to relatively old and relatively obscure games that
don't seem to have mass market appeal right now.
So; I would like to point out that Final FantasyXII which is fairly recent
and is very popular indeed has a system for programming friendly AI.
In this game you control a group of young warriors that travel and get in a
lot of battles. Unlike previous versions ("Final" is getting quite silly as
a word here) combat is in realtime. The catch is that the player doesn't
have to control all actions by all active friendly characters explicitly and
can instead use a simple but relatively versatile set of rules to form a
sort of AI for his characters.
Aside from the evident mainstream appeal of this game another aspect that
might be interesting here is the way this system is woven into the gameplay.
In FinalFantasy the player can discover and acquire items like magical
swords but in this version the player can similarly find or "buy" new
instructions. These are fairly simple, no loops or recursion or exceptions
or whatever, we are talking about stuff in the order of "target; a sleeping
enemy" which will allow one to construct a rule that basically expresses "if
you see a sleeping enemy try to steel loot from him", the character will do
this unless some other rule is more important at that moment (this is
expressed by the order in which they are placed) but the way in which all of
this is integrated with the rest of the game is somewhat interesting.
I wonder to what degree this mechanic will use the rather common situation
of gamers cursing at friendly AI controlled characters to introduce
programming as a concept to people who might otherwise never encounter it,
this might be a strong incentive to some.
My cent(s),
Kas.
Received on Wed Jan 02 2008 - 16:19:44 GMT