GDC08: Thwarting the XNA AI challenge

Haha, this sounds awesome. I hope they put up videos of the different matches!

epic win

...It's the mirrors

NEEEEEEEERDS!!!
Ha ha ha!
j/k

Probably one of the geekiest competitions in human history. The guy with the ponytail on the opposite side looks so intense.

How cool is that party going to be? Lol this is a great idea for a competition though.

And thus Skynet was born.

god id love to take a shot at that!

I love C-Robots! I want something like this on XBL. Or even something Carnage Heart like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_Heart

I would love to see the outcome of this. Will the uber-complicated AI win or will the "determine location of nearest enemy then shoot there" AI put the over-thinkers to shame?

nice scam to get some FREE AI programming fom XNA games, Microsoft!

Hi, everyone. My name is Matt Picioccio, and I'm the guy on the XNA Game Studio team who wrote the framework for the challenge, and I worked the booth along with a many others.

The event was terrific, and everybody had a great time. The finals at the Microsoft XNA Party was INTENSE. We'll have a page of info up on http://creators.xna.com about it "soon" (i.e. after we recover from GDC), but sadly no video (I'm pretty sure not, at least).

Hi Matt, how did my bot do? I gave away my pass to the party, as I had to get back to work. :-(

Just in case anyone is interested, here's a basic rundown:

It's 4 ships shooting at each other. Asteroids are also on play field. I think its +1/kill, -1/asteroid death and -2/enemy kill?

All AI Processing needs to be run under 3 ms. You get the positions of all ships, asteroids and projectiles. All you have to do is set direction to shoot, direction to go, and how much thrust to burn.

All in all, it's like Iron Chef... the clock runs so fast, and you can't implement everything you want. Overall, it was fun, and a interesting intro to C#/XNA.

When someone dies:
-1 for the person who dies.
-1 for the person who dies if they died by hitting an asteroid (i.e. -2).
+1 for the person who fired the shot that killed you.
+1 for the person who did at least 50% of the damage to you this "life", if there is one.

We'll have more details on the Creators Club website soon.

SeDemonSuicide:

Charles Cox has your contact info from the sheet, and he will be contacting you next week.

I advanced to the finals round at the XNA party, and Matt was dead-on, it was actually pretty intense. Kind of like watching a dog fight, but a lot more humane and no betting involved (although that would have made things even more interesting). The party was absolutely fantastic. This XNA stuff is really exciting, especially to someone looking at some new avenues in the business.

The challenge itself was a lot of fun. I actually ended up getting to the finals with a fairly simple solution that was capitalized more on the mechanics of the game than intelligent design. With only 50 minutes to code the AI, I didn't have time to do anything complex, not to mention I spend the first half of it learning the classes and dusting off my memory on vector math.

In the end though, it seems like I lost to over-thinkers. Maybe next year :).