[GAUGING INTEREST] AI for flying enemies; anyone interested?

[netcop0207]

I'm working on a couple of projects that require AI characters capable of flying around and attack, evade incoming attack, etc.
At first I thought it wouldn't be really difficult, but to be honest it is quite handful.
So it got me thinking, if there are enough interests and demands for Flying AI, maybe I should go the extra mile(by this, I mean I'd put in more works than requirements for flying AI for the aforementioned projects) and make one for the marketplace.
I know there's DoN's pathfinding plugin for flying AI and it is really good, but from what I've experienced it's not suitable for situation like dogfight. Or maybe it is perfectly suitable and I did something wrong. (Not being sarcastic) In that case, please enlighten me.


Anyway, here's what I had in mind so far;
* Fighter
- Approach to target and attack(shoot projectiles)
- Predict path of incoming threat
- Evade incoming threat
- Avoid collision when moving
- Bombing
There's gonna be 2 version. One with hovering capability and the other without(i.e. constantly thrusting).

*Mothership
- Spawn and command fighters
- Support fighters
- Bombing
- Target and attack enemy directly

I feel like I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff. If I remember anything I'll update the description above.
In the meantime I'm open for any suggestion.


If anyone's interested, please let me know.

[Mr_SquarePeg]

This would be of great interest to me

[thadkinsjr]

Planes, and sci fi stuff would be great. i would like to see more weird natural stuff on marketplace. A bee swarm, birds, bats, and random things that don't just fly in a straight line, loop, or figure 8. I havent gotten as far as programming AI in my game. I plan on putting enemy bees into my game as kind of an easter egg. My family farms bees. For me personally I'm not doing anything sci fi as of now. But if it was a complex system than I would probably get it just to look at it, or keep it in my asset library. There's an altimeter set up in kite demo.
One Idea is to have them change weapons from light to heavy. If it's sci fi. Just like a light laser gun, and then charging cannon. You could send out some scout drones, and put a camera up instead of a minimap. I think people would be interested in some strange custom stuff like that. So Long post shorter. If it's good. I will pick it up just to browse it as I enjoy looking at other peoples logic, and coding. If it came with premium assets, or was a game style templete kit. I would pre order.

[Yun-Kun]

Hello there

Our studio is highly interested in flying AI, both in terms of research & development and active development.

I'm aware of Don's Flying AI plugin that I pushed into my launcher but did not have the time to play around as of yet.

For a studio like ours, the perfect tool would just be a 3D navmesh with the same rules / features than a 2D one:
- calculating paths (dodges static and dynamic obstacles)
- RVO avoidance
- dynamic rebuild
- performance efficient

We could ask our programmers to R&D about it (we're a young studio, we need to develop our skills) but for now we opted for a cheap alternative (fake flying enemies) and honestly it's not that bad. Especially since our expectations of a flying AI system are quite high.

Have a good days ladies and gentlemen

[netcop0207]

Thanks guys! I'll see what I can do to make it more interesting.

Planes, and sci fi stuff would be great. i would like to see more weird natural stuff on marketplace. A bee swarm, birds, bats, and random things that don't just fly in a straight line, loop, or figure 8. I havent gotten as far as programming AI in my game. I plan on putting enemy bees into my game as kind of an easter egg. My family farms bees. For me personally I'm not doing anything sci fi as of now. But if it was a complex system than I would probably get it just to look at it, or keep it in my asset library.
There's an altimeter set up in kite demo.
One Idea is to have them change weapons from light to heavy. If it's sci fi. Just like a light laser gun, and then charging cannon. You could send out some scout drones, and put a camera up instead of a minimap. I think people would be interested in some strange custom stuff like that. So Long post shorter. If it's good. I will pick it up just to browse it as I enjoy looking at other peoples logic, and coding. If it came with premium assets, or was a game style templete kit. I would pre order.

I appreciate your insight. I did think about putting in flocking logic for organic flying AI and rather complicated movement like scissors, defensive spiral, etc for mechanical AI. Hope I can take care of that.
And by kite demo you mean the one in which a young boy chases around a kite, right?

[GAME3D]

How does it handle navigation into a 3d space? I like the idea of flying AI.

[thadkinsjr]

Yeah theres some game play in there, but they put a cool widget, and altimeter in.

[UnrealEnterprise]

Yes please - But prefer No-Plugins / No-Navmesh Solutions

There's a real demand for this. But preferably non-plugin solutions if possible imo.
There is a lot of free flying templates / weapon projectile systems floating around.
So the bar is high. Personally I dislike navmeshes, prefer a live system that adapts.
Think commercial aviation: odd / even air corridors, TCAS and visual flight rules etc.

[netcop0207]

How does it handle navigation into a 3d space? I like the idea of flying AI.

I considered using nav mesh as that basically seems like the most appropriate and viable approach. But after some testing, I found it a tad ineffective in terms of performance if an AI needs to avoid obstacles or neighboring pawns continuously since it needs to abort current movement and do query again and again. So I'm considering using 3D nav mesh to find a couple of raw path(checking only static components such as landscape) and use steering logic to avoid all dynamic components in a level while keeping a controlled pawn in track of the selected path. So far the steering logic works quite well but needs optimization.
Or maybe something like a navigation invoker. Didn't try that yet. It might be quite limiting but worth looking into, imo.

Personally I dislike navmeshes, prefer a live system that adapts.

Amen to that.
Btw could you elaborate on those free flying templates you mentioned?
I did some searching for days but the only thing I could find was Peter L. Newton's flying AI project.
Maybe on git?

[thadkinsjr]

There's a real demand for this. But preferably non-plugin solutions if possible imo.
There is a lot of free flying templates / weapon projectile systems floating around.
So the bar is high. Personally I dislike navmeshes, prefer a live system that adapts.
Think commercial aviation: odd / even air corridors, TCAS and visual flight rules etc.

I think hes going sci fi. He has mothership involved. I tried to get a natural approach like birds, bees, eagles etc.
If it's a cool system I will probably pick it up. I like to look at the blueprints when they involve different physics.
I like the flight system in BF1 with the little gauges and stuff. Some of the worst games I've played were flight sim games.
Anyway. I seen this as I like the humor at dueling analogs. It kind of fits a post like this.

[UnrealEnterprise]

I think hes going sci fi. He has mothership involved. If it's a cool system I will probably pick it up. I like to look at the blueprints when they involve different physics.

Working in Sci-Fi atm so all good.

Agree you learn a lot looking at other templates even if the genre is different.

Btw could you elaborate on those free flying templates you mentioned?

No worries... Check your inbox!

[randallelliott]

whatever happened to this idea? i'm not doing too well trying to make a flying space ship to dog fight with...i'm having trouble finding anyone telling how it is done...for some reason on my previous tries where i simply rotated the enemy space ship towards the player it's been dropping the performance...really would like to see this

[franciscocruz]

I'm working in my own space combat AI KIT because it's hard to implement the whole logic from others when you have lot of work already done. At this time I have finished a very simple "Enemy Spawner System" which spawn AI enemy actors that ALL heading towards the player. I'm working in to assign some randomness to them, tough. There is a buddy that help the player in the dogfight too. It's pretty simplistic but it work nice for me. In other hand, because I'm a very old StarWars fan, I decide to base all the art and assets around this theme (I think this is not a problem at all).

I promise to share the project to the community. I dream with something that can be used as a open source project that can grown and play it by SW fans around the world.

[Thunder_Owl]

Hello! Somehow, I wasn't aware of this thread before, hmm, strange. Are things progressing into something by Netcop0207? Or anyone else? Thank You!