One of the main uses of artificial intelligence in games is to perform path planning, the search for a sequence of movements through the virtual environment that gets an agent from one location to another without running into any obstacles. In order for an agent to engage in path planning, there must be a topography for the agent to traverse that is represented in a form that can be efficiently reasoned about. The simplest topography is a grid. Think of an imaginary lattice of cells superimposed over an environment such that an agent can be in one cell at a time. Moving in a grid is relatively straightforward: from any cell, an agent can traverse to any of its four (or eight) neighboring cells.
In this project, I write the code to superimpose a grid over any given terrain so that an agent can navigate by moving left, right, up, or down from cell to cell. The code to generate the grid should work on any terrain such that an agent can never collide with an obstacle.
The game engine is object-oriented. The primary object is the GameWorld, which is a container for all other obstacles. Most importantly, the GameWorld object contains the terrain of the virtual environment. The terrain is represented as a list of Obstacle objects, which themselves are polygons—lists of points such that there is a line between every adjacent point (and the first and last points in the list. The GameWorld also manages the agents, bullets, resources (things that agents can gather) and computes collisions between all objects and obstacles. The GameWorld also does important stuff like run the real-time game loop and maintain the rendering windows.
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