koobas.hobune.stream
Boss AI help
I've only just started to try and create a boss fight and so far I'm very confused on how to do it.
What I want is a boss which will change state after a certain amount of time so for example it will be shooting at the player and then after a certain amount of time it will change to do some special attack and then go back to shooting the player. Then after a certain amount of time it will switch to a different special attack and so on.
When I first started to try and program a boss fight, I had an idea on how to do it by using State Machines which to tell the truth, I haven't used before.
So i was wondering if someone would be able to give me an idea on how i could do the switch state in certain amount of time, go back to original state and then to a new state and so on?
And also if using State Machines for a boss fight is a good idea or is there something else I should use? (For C# by the way)
A state machine is a pretty standard and easy way to implement uncomplicated ai. http://gameprogram$$anonymous$$gpatterns.com/state.html is a good description of the pattern. It's in c++, but the author explains pretty well, so even if you're unfamiliar with c++, you should still be able to follow along. If you want to go more in depth with ai, I recommend checking out the book "Program$$anonymous$$g game AI by example" by $$anonymous$$at Buckland.
So would you say there are more efficient but harder ways to create boss AI?
As LazyElephant said, a state machine is a fairly straight forward way. You just have states for "blocking", "shooting", "powering up" etc and then some logic to switch between those states.
For more advanced AI you can look at using a Behaviour Tree, which are basically a system of helping AI make decisions about what they want to do at a given point. There are a couple of assets out there to help with this. Rain is one such solution: http://rivaltheory.com/rain/ Another is Behaviour Designer: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/behavior-designer-behavior-trees-for-everyone.227497/
I think both the above are free and both have similar implementations, but if you want to go down the behavior tree root then it will take a bit of reading and experimentation to truly understand how best to implement your AI.
EDIT: Behaviour Designer isn't free. My bad.
