I'd definitely recommend taking at look at Penny Sweetser's pages, including her publications and links.

http://www.cs.uq.edu.au/~penny/

Penny is doing her PhD in this area and has made some good contributions to the literature, which you can find on her publications page.

Cheers,

Timkin

Thanks again Nice Coder for some excellent input, much appreciated =)

Great point on 2D arrays, didn't know that but it does make sence. However I seem to have got my 2D array working, so am going to stick with that for the time being.

With the A*, I'm using a AI Game Programing Wisdom 1 article by James Matthews as a basis for my algortihm. I was going to extend my InfluenceElements to be nodes within this method.

But for now I'm going to work through your algorithm and try and work it out ;)

Thanks again,

~Red

On William van der Sterren's site CGF-AI, there is some information about using influence maps under Presentations on the Products page (at least iirc it is there - I know I've read something by him on it).

Quote:

Original post by Red Skwerl Thanks again Nice Coder for some excellent input, much appreciated =) Great point on 2D arrays, didn't know that but it does make sence. However I seem to have got my 2D array working, so am going to stick with that for the time being. With the A*, I'm using a AI Game Programing Wisdom 1 article by James Matthews as a basis for my algortihm. I was going to extend my InfluenceElements to be nodes within this method. But for now I'm going to work through your algorithm and try and work it out ;) Thanks again, ~Red

I've always found the 1d method worked best for me, but to each his own!

The easiest way i managed to integrate the influencemap and my a*, is to od something like.

Nw = Node.Weighting + (32767 - inf[Nindex])

Where 32767 is the maximum influence. The value of it shifts +- 32767, to the full 2^16 = 65535.

Yikes! some of those need a real clipping, so i'll edit my post, to try and make it more readable.

From,
Nice coder

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil!

Not in my line of work.

I basically have my own STL, which has everything and the kitchen sink, all fully optimised (at least the majority of it is), and ready to go (as well as documented). The thing is finding it, i've got source files which do heaps of things, just lying everywhere in folders that haven't seen the light of day for years...

This is from my STL. if i need something to change in it, i take the version from the tree, before i optimised it, and then go and change it, then reoptimise it.

Its a nice way to spend an afternoon.

From,
Nice coder

I thought women were the route of all evil, have you not seen that equation? lol

Good point about marking the 'points of death'. I like that, I was thinking of using the influence map grid to develop a world map too. This thing has so many uses, I don't understand why it isn't more exploited.

Actually its used quite often (and i'm going to Rate++ you for being curious, and overall being nice).

Some intereting things that its been used for

FPS maps, using A* to determine where the agent wants to go.
RTS maps, to determine a whole range of things.
Board games, to determine weak squares, points of attack and many other things.
Stratagy games, To determine a whole range of nice thing about the environment.

As usual, i'm here for any question of any sort about anything.
And if i don't know what to do, i'll give you my best guess, and try to find you the answer elsewhere for you.

From,
Nice coder

How come there seems to be so little literature on the subject then?

You seem to have a lot of knowledge in this area Nice Coder, are you in the industry and doing this sort of thing?

I'm not really in the buisiness.
I do know an awefull lot about an awefull lot tho.

I do do this sort of thing, mostly for fun. somtimes to sell it to others to use.

From,
Nice coder