Excal's Forum Posts

  • This is a paid position. I will pay primarily via bank transfer, but I can see about paying via Paypal if preferred.

    I am seeking a C2 developer with experience in creating AI for board games. Please message me or respond to this topic with some examples of other projects you have created. I will get back to you with more details and whatnot if you look credible :)

  • Helladen, do you have any experience creating AI behaviors in C2?

  • Alright, I added in the code to show the pathfinding grid whenever a pathfinding object is active.

    Can someone please take a look? moveFinder seems to be pathfinding correctly, but spaceTracker has a very erratic pathfinding grid for some odd reason.

    BoardGame.capx

  • I tried to see the 3rd program skipping, I couldn't see it skip 2 or so squares. I didn't see it teleport to the program? how to make it do that. Currently they just move till they are opposite my programs. Then I move into them and they disappear.

    A lot of times, the pathfinder object for the last computer object 'jumps' to the program and skips several squares. Since the computer object will only move based on how the pathfinder object moved, the computer object will 'jump' past several squares when moving.

    There are other times when pathfinding just fails to work and the computer object sits there and the game stalls because it assumes pathfinding either finds a path or fails to find a path. I don't see how pathfinding can fail to find a path and also not trigger the fail to find path.

    Maybe this isn't even a good way to approach the AI. This is what I came up with because I don't know how to mathematically determine a route from point A to point B, and I figured that's what pathfinding is good for. However, in my setup pathfinding seems to be buggy and inconsistent, and I think I'm going to need a new method for determining movement.

    I looked at an example from R0J0hound, but his version creates the board tiles when they are needed and then mathematically backtracks, whereas my game has the board tiles present at all times and therefore needs some sort of way to traverse (I'm using a pathfinding object) from point A to point B.

    Dave Hailwood, how did you construct the AI for your board game? Anyone else have ideas how to determine a path from point A to point B without using pathfinding?

  • Ashley, I still think this would be a useful debugger feature. I tried converting the stock demo events to work in my project, but I'm pretty sure what I saw was not the obstacle grid.

  • There's always a lot of questions on this forum that concern the pathfinding plugin. Pathfinding by nodes is non-intuitive because we have to 'imagine' what the field looks like and can't automatically account for small gaps or other issues.

    Pathfinding debugging generally takes as much time as previous debugging did before the debugger. For example, array debugging before the debugger could take hours, but now we can see problems in real-time and solve array issues in minutes.

    Is there any way we can trigger a pathfinding field to show up in the debugger? I don't care if it only works for 'solids' initially, but just something to make this more intuitive would be great.

    Ashley

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  • I probably could once I have free time.

    It's honestly more complicated than what I posted. There is A LOT to account for, and even throwing together a basic .capx showing off this type of behavior would be a lot of work.

  • I tossed it in and modified it to the best of my ability, but what it shows me is definitely not the obstacle path.

  • Is there any way to make the pathfinding obstacle course show up? Maybe a debugger request?

  • There's still a 'skip' that happens due to pathfinding (shown in my second post), and I'm not sure why that is.

    What do you mean by setup? I have diagonals turned off.

    The third program that moves always ends up skipping because the pathfinding object skips a square or two and teleports to the program. The program moves in the opposite order of squares as the pathfinding object.

  • Bump. I'm still not sure why pathfinding moves diagonally when it's turned off.

  • Ashley, if I have diagonals turned off for pathfinding, why do pathfinder objects still move diagonally?

    <img src="http://i.imgur.com/SwL20Co.png" border="0" />

    <img src="http://i.imgur.com/Y8NClPn.png" border="0" />

    I'm using cell size 64. I tried 65, but it's one pixel too big, causing pathfinding to jump (teleport) past obstacles. At 64, it seems to take diagonal paths.

  • I've fixed the pathfinder object jumps.

    Now the third AI program seems to always skip a square even though none of the others do (and they all use the same movement function).

    <img src="http://i.imgur.com/3Lfz5cM.png" border="0" />

    If anyone can take a look, that would be great.

    I'm getting very close to turning this into a playable prototype!

  • I've never experienced this before.

    I am using two pathfinding objects in my application - one which pathfinds from the computer object to the closest player object, 'tagging' squares along the way. The second one starts at the furthest tagged square and moves to the computer object, creating a 'movement list' along the way. The computer object them moves according to this movement list.

    I'm seeing weird things happen - the pathfinder object seems to ignore several solids and sometimes even jump.

    The .capx has a lot of events, but very few of the events deal with pathfinding (and most of the crucial stuff like cell size is assigned in the editor anyway). You should be able to see what I mean by running the .capx once or twice (be sure the Gameplay layout is selected before you run it!).

    BoardGame.capx

  • The beta releases have this thing called a debugger. It has sped up my development progress significantly, and I don't see any reason not to download it.