Simultaneous AI in turn based games
- by Eduard Strehlau
I want to hack together a roguelike. Now I thought about entity and world representation and got to a quite big problem.
If you want all the AI to act simultaneously you would normally(in cellular automa for examble) just copy the cell buffer and let all action of indiviual cells depend on the copy. Actions which are not valid anymore after some cell before the cell you are currently operating on changed the original enviourment(blocking the path) are just ignored or reapplied with the "current"(between turns) environment. After all cells have acted you copy the current map to the buffer again.
Now for an environment with complex AI and big(datawise) entities the copying would take too long. So I thought you could put every action and entity makes into a que(make no changes to the environment) and execute the whole que after everyone took their move.
Every interaction on this que are realy interacting entities, so if a entity tries to attack another entity it sends a message to it, the consequences of the attack would be visible next turn, either by just examining the entity or asking the entity for data. This would remove problems like what happens if an entity dies middle in the cue but got actions or is messaged later on(all messages would go to null, and the messages from the entity would either just be sent or deleted(haven't decided yet)
But what would happen if a monster spawns a fireball which by itself tracks the player(in the same turn). Should I add the fireball to the enviourment beforehand, so make a change to the environment before executing the action list or just add the ball to the "need updated" list as a special case so it doesn't exist in the environment and still operates on it, spawing after evaluating the action list?
Are there any solutions or papers on this subject which I can take a look at?
EDIT: I don't need information on writing a roguelike I need information on turn based ai in respective to a complex enviourment.
