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Sunday, July 25, 2004

Cool Scent tracking AI

Well as mentioned in my prev post I have successfully got a Scent tracking AI up and running. Basicly the principle is this. As the player moves around the world they leave scent molecules behind. Each scent molecule has a decay rate so that there scent strength is reduced over time until it completly dissapates. 

As for the enemy AI, I gave the enemies 2 scent detectors. One on each side of it's body that extend foward. When a scent detector detecs a scent molecule the enemy will turn in the direction that it's scent detector was facing and move in that direction. I was caught compleatly off guard by how simple the code is to get the enemies to track your characters scent.

I was going to try and do a video screen capture but the screen capture software is unable to capture the AI at work. But I will keep trying.

So why did I try my hand at coding some scent tracking AI you ask? Well first off for gamming, but also it can be a cool feature to have in games like RPG's where you could have a pack of wild dogs or monsters that will catch your scent and start fallowing you!

Once I have played around with the code some more I intend to add additional AI both for vision and sound tracking.

One problem is that the Scent tracker AI is written in VB.NET 2005 express beta 1 and requires the .NET framework v2.0 beta in order to compile and run. So I won't be uploading the code just yet. Not until .NET 2.0 and VB.NET 2005 are offically availible.  But if someone wants the code anyway, I can provide it to them, just email me at createdbyx@gmail.com.