26.11.2018 Scene 1 Initial Design

Scene 1 of my animation will be set in a city scene in which the main character will walk down. What actually happens will be detailed in a storyboard in a future blog post.
The city scene will be an l shaped street in which many extra characters will be walking in the background to simulate a busy street. The buildings on the street will be mainly house/apartments from the outside appearance and there will be some small shops much like the image below where there are shops on the ground floor and apartments/offices on the upper floors.

My initial designs for the street are shown below in a little detail but is enough to stat designing the street.

Lecture Notes AI in Games

AHH

Algorithms - set of code that performs a simple task - simulate real world behaviour

Heuristics - the process of learning from past experiences or mistakes to produce a solution
 Four aspects of heurisitcs
Optimility - choosing the best choice
Completeness - finding all choices
Accuracy - how good is the solution
Execution - is the heurisitcs the best for finding a solution

Hacks - events in games that can ruin immersion and are generally unexpected
E.G - AI having information they shouldnt
       - Good hacks  - Cutscene that doesnt flow with the gameplay.
       - Bad hacks - Ai knowing exactly where the player is and finding them.

Hardware constraints - A more graphically intensive game will not run on lesser hardware.
E.G - PUBG mobile. less graphially impressive than pc because smartphones are not powerful enough. Try to keep same game if possible to keep player experience the same.
Bad player experience means less returning players, therefore less money.

Ai techniques

Boids flocking - Emulation of real world behaviour of organisms in groups - emergent behaviour
Aspects of Boid flocking
Separation - each boid has personal space to avoid hitting local boids
Allignment - each boid generally faces the same way when moving
Cohesion - individual boids move towards average position of local boids
E.G zombies in games that form hordes to hunt players. - Left 4 Dead.

 Pathfinding - How an AI gets from point A to point B

Pathfinding algorithms

A* Algorithms
- most widely used
- built into most game engines
- good balance between accuracy and speed

Dijkstra Algorithm
-finds shortest path between two points
- example of Dikstra is google maps

Cost driven
-tries to find balance between shortest route and cost to get there

Decision Making - All AI entities funtion from a decision tree

Decision tree - pre programmed behaviour with preset outcomes
-E.G is player nearby - yes, attack - , no - continue patrol

State machine - seperate states that control an AI character, only one state can be active at one time
-E.G [Patrol]->[Attack]->[Defend]->[Flee]->[Return to patrol]

Fuzzy Logic - being between two states
-E.G Status bars , Health , Stamina
-Rather than being 1 or 0 can be somewhere in between eg 1-10
-Health bar - 90% health is neither perfectly healthy or completely dead.

Startegy - using above techniques alonf with other AI to complete objectives - flanking and ambushes.

Learning techniques

19.11.2018 Vendo intitial 3D model

The first character that i have modelled is Vendo, the Robotic vending machine. When modelling Vendo i made a large change to the design of the model. In the initial sketch, i intended to give him  rocket boosters that made him hover. Instead i have given him four legs and will walk rather than hover. However a problem that i may have with Vendo having limbs is that the legs may not look metallic when animated. This means that i may have to not give Vendo a skeleton and rather animate the legs without a skeleton.

While i am happy with the initial model, i think that a few things could be changed and will be changed in the future. One of these is that the legs and feet are too square and i think that they would look better if they were more cylyndrical. This change would also fix the issue of the model not having a skeleton due to the how the legs would look with a skeleton.

The insides of Vendo and all of the "products" are shown below. The textures for Vendo and the objects inside were made in photoshop and were applied using UV maps.

12.11.2018 More character design sketches

One of the scenes that i have in mind ,which will be detailed in a later blog post, is a city scene which will have the main character walk down. To make the city feel like a real place, there will be some generic robots that will be walking up and down the street and will effectively be extra character much like in a real movie.

The robot on the left is going to be a cylindrical robot with a ball that lets it roll along the floor. The robot on the right will more boxy in its design and its chest will be a have limbs rather than a ball to move. Both of these designs would have different colours to differentiate them when passing in the background of city scenes.

The left robot was inspired by the android robot in its barrel like torso design.

5.11.2018 Initial Character sketches

Since my project is going to be a short 5 minute film, there are going to be several characters that are going to be featured and all of them are going to be robots. Below are some of my initial sketches oof what the characters could look like.

The first character that i designed was the main characters sidekick, Vendo.

Vendo is a talking vending machine that is designed to be the comdey relief character much like Patrick from Spongebob. This initial design of Vendo has jets that make him hover and eyes that are suspended in the vending machine glass much like a hologram. While not detailed in the image there are going to be several products stocked behind the glass much like a real vending machine.The sketch below is not final and aspects may change. When i come to 3D model it, it will be changed there

The second character that i designed is the the Police Chief called Big Chief. Big Chief has been designed to be a police chief similar in design to Bigwled from the film Robots in the sense that it is designed to be a big ball with a floating top half also similar to BB-8 from star wars.Below, the left image is my initial sketch of Big Chief. An aspect of the design for Big Chief that i plan to change is to make him have a hat more akin to a Sheriff hat. 

Another design that i have sketched, while not in the current roster of character i would like to include is the design below. It is nowhere near finished however it is supposed to be an old CRT Monitor that moves around due to it being on tank treads. The design is reminiscent of the Robobrains from the Fallout Series.