Abstract
In the wider perspective of narrowing down some of the gaps that prevent the adoption of declarative logic programming within highly dynamically changing environments, we focus in this paper on the context of integrating reasoning modules in real-time videogames. Integrating rule-based AI within the commercial game development life-cycle poses a number of unsolved challenges, each with non-obvious solution. For instance, it is necessary to cope with strict time performance requirements; the duality between procedural code and declarative specifications prevents easy integration; the concurrent execution of reasoning tasks and game updates requires proper information passing strategies between the two involved sides. In this work we illustrate our recent progress on how to embed rule-based reasoning modules into the well-known Unity game development engine. To this end, we report about ThinkEngine, a framework in which a tight integration of declarative formalisms within the typical game development workflow is made possible. We prove the viability of our approach by developing a proof-of-concept Unity game that makes use of ASP-based AI modules.
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For space reasons we will not describe how matrices are translated.
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I.e. a window similar to the Unity inspector. The inspector displays detailed information about the currently selected game object, including all attached components.
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Conditions are selected from a set of boolean functions customized by the developer.
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This assertion maps facts derived from the ArenaGrid sensor mapped by the predicate arenaGrid(arena(arena(tiles(X,Y,arenaTile(empty(T)))))).
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Angilica, D., Ianni, G., Pacenza, F. (2019). Tight Integration of Rule-Based Tools in Game Development. In: Alviano, M., Greco, G., Scarcello, F. (eds) AI*IA 2019 – Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI*IA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11946. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35166-3_1
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