Terrain & Pathfinding

As mentioned before, the implementation and demonstration of my AI will take place in a 3D environment inside a Game Engine.

The engine I'm going to be using is Unity 3D, mostly because I have 2 years of experience with this engine and I love every part of it. Also, working with a known game engine will save me a lot of time.

Some of the graphics assets are part of a Pack I bought on the Unity Asset Store, and some of them are mine (I use Blender for modelling and unwraping and photoshop for texturing).


Map

I have been setting the environment where the acction will take place. The map consists of a limited field, and distributed resources. I have done the map for two players because it will be great to watch two AI competing against each other for the resources.

One of the starting areas has more resources around it than the other one (more gold and stone). This will give a significant advantage to one of the AI players, and it will show how the AI adapts to different situations.

The resources are food, wood, stone and gold ore. In this image we can see all of them except food, which will be manufactured in farms.

The resources and the game itself will be explained in the next publication.

A* Pathfinding

Although I have implemented my own A* pathfinding for a 2D game in C++, adapting it to the 3D environment and C# could take a lot of time and it's not the main objective of my project. For this reason, I will be using Aron's Granberg A* Pathdinfing to move all my units.

I have already implemented and tested it inside Unity, and I couldn't be happier with the results. Here is a image of some units avoiding obstacles (stone in this case).

The small red cubes at the bottom of the stone are non-walkable nodes, and they are avoided by the units.