Animation integration

During the last month we managed to integrate all the basic moves for the players. This significally improves the gameplay and the feel of the game. It also proves that our current content path works and we are able to import the motion capture data in to the game. The content path, in general, actually works a lot better than we even imagined. One important thing to notice is also, that we made it to work in such a short time, which allows us to concentrate the actual quality of the animations.

To get the animations to the level we want, we still need to spend a lot of hours to tweaking them. For that, we need to build some tools, which ofcourse somewhat slows down the actual development. We still believe, that good tools are worth it in a long term thinking.

Here's a short list of the currently integrated animations

• Movement, all directions. Jogging & running with and without ball
• Slapshot, standing still & running
• Snapshot, standing still & running
• Pokechecking, standing still & running
• Basic deke, from forehand to backhand
• Faceoff

AI development

The game is unneccesarily big environment for just testing and debugging the AI solutions during development, and for this reason we have a separate "simulator" for AI - it's a greatly simplified version of the game in 2D with circle characters going around doing their thing, and it graphically illustrates how the agents experience the world which obviously helps a great deal in testing and verifying the correctness of solutions.

Here is a screenshot of the AI simulator and some things the AI can already sense and do.

Techniques and methods made use of

• goal/utility based agents
• behavior trees
• choice evaluation and decision making
• steering behaviors
• sight sector calculation
• time estimation

Agents can currently sense, detect and estimate things like

• whether passing to a fellow team member will succeed or not
• obvious scoring chances, "holes to the net"
• good clear shooting chances without a mask
• open sectors to attempt to run and confront the goalie by close
• who is the closest to a rolling loose ball time-wise - which team has the possession?
• when an opponent is becoming a real threat, also taking into account the ability to cover the ball with own body
• if a fellow team member not controlling the ball has a better opportunity to score
• incoming collisions to other players for avoiding them

Fieldplayer agents can currently succeed in - besides basic actions like passing the ball around, shooting, moving and breaking the ball control - i.e.

• in defence, picking their men to shadow and try preventing them from receiving passes, even in fast underpowered situations like 3 vs 2
• making decisions by choosing an action regarding current goals and utilities (action success probabilities, profits)
• clearing the ball in a tight and risky situation
• avoiding collisions
• chasing moving targets efficiently, e.g. ball or ball controlling player
• carrying out a simple hit in
• a basis for system to allow usage of staticly defined tactics exists - theoretically, tactics sequences for free hit or hit in could be created

Team agents, coaches, send out coordinative instructions to their members mostly through playing zones

• formations for attacking, defending and faceoff
• formation reacts to horizontal ball position, e.g. more on the left or right
• formation also reacts to various key players: ball controller, last defending man

Things to do

• real life floorball strategies - currently defined playing strategy is more like playing for fun and just tossing the ball around as opposed to playing competitively
• locate empty free areas in the field, corners and between players to help choosing movement paths more purposefully
• reaction time to emulate human behavior

Gameplay

Gameplay has also been developed during animation integration and AI development work.

Features included at the moment in the game are

• Preparing for faceoff
• Faceoff
• Preparing for Hit-in after ball has gone out of rink bounds
• Hit-in
• Goal detection

Development will continue with features containing

• Line changes
• Penalties
• Free-hit
• Penalty shot

Back to main page