Getting Started!

Good evening,

This is a "Blog" that I have set up to help me, my tutor, classmates and anyone else that takes an interest keep track of my progress over the next 7 months as I prepare too and write my final year Honours Dissertation.

I suppose the best place to start would be to give a little background info, I've just started my final year at Abertay University studying a BSc in Computer Games Technology, a course that I hope will help lead to a programming job in the computer games industry. Part of your final year, as I'm sure many people reading this blog will be aware off, involves writing a Dissertation on a topic of your choice in which you are required to do most, if not all, of the research and writing of yourself.

Well for my dissertation I've decided upon basing it on Artificial Intelligence (AI), you are probably thinking this is a bit of a large topic area and well you'd be right and so I am currently working on narrowing that scope down into one of three areas, which i specified in the first "Worksheet" I was asked to complete as part of my dissertation module at university:

1. Looking at the difference between “rules based” and “script based” forms of AI, and how rules are generally considered to be more realistic and challenging in games however scripting is a lot faster to execute in a game and why it is the method normally implemented.

2. Looking at what would be the most effective method for calculating for AI for hunting a target in 3-Dimensions, e.g. in a flight combat game. Examples of areas to look at would be ray-tracing or A* path finding.

3. Or learning/adaptive AI for example in a strategy game, Command & Conquer for example, rather than scripting the computer to build a base, following a set pattern every match, looking at ways for it to develop its own strategies to combat a human opponent as it gets to “know” the players tactics. In the same way as players online would get to understand other players methods the more they played each other.

Out of these three more specific areas I find myself currently leaning in the direction of No.1 as I have read a paper on this area already and see that there is a lot of interest on both sides of the argument, however I also feel that No.3 could be quite interesting and after reading an article on "Gamasutra" (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041122/bourg_01.shtml) I have decided to give it some more consideration.

So my plan for the weekend now is to read up more on these two areas, and read over the feedback from my module tutor, Dr C Süheyl Özveren, which should arrive by Friday and I should have decided by the beginning of next week, when I'll start formulating my "Research Question" more on that next week!

Feelin' Fine!
Stuart "Tsoski" Robb