August 10, 2020
AI For Beginners
Goal Orientated Action Planning (GOAP)
Part 11
Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses
Unity Learn Course – AI For Beginners
Adding More Resources to the World
Adding More Resources to the World
The next step is setting up the use of the cubicles in the world. Similarly to patients, these cubicles act as a resource available to the agents. Therefore they must be monitored by the world state in some way to determine how many are available and which ones so they can be distributed properly when needed.
Setting this up was very similar to how the patient resources were. They added a queue of gameobjects to hold the cubicles in the GWorld class. This was a bit different as it also initialized full of resources, so the cubicles were immediately added to this queue (through FindGameObjectsWithTag) upon initialization. Then again similar to patients (except through the GWorld class itself instead of an action) a state was added to the WorldStates named “FreeCubicle” with a value equivalent to the number of cubicles.
Having these resources that are not other agents leads them to create a new class called GInventory to help organize and allocate these resources. The class created a list of gameobjects named items which effectively just stores whatever gameobjects may be needed as resources. The overarching GAgent class then had a GInventory added to it so all agents could access this pool or resources.
They then move on to the GetPatient GAction again to modify it to work with this new GInventory setup. They have added a gameobject named resource to hold a reference to a cubicle. The Preperform method of the GetPatient GAction now grabs a cubicle from the world state (if one is avaiable) and references it through this resource. If successful, it uses the WorldStates ModifyState method to reduce the “FreeCubicle” state by 1 through the following line:GWorld.Instance.GetWorld().ModifyState(“FreeCubicle”, -1);
Similarly, the Postperform method of this GetPatient GAction now uses ModifyState to reduce the count of the “Waiting” state by 1 to account for the patient that is removed from the waiting status. Since every agent has a GInventory of their own now, this patient agent is given a reference to the same cubicle resource the nurse agent is using so that in the next steps they can travel to the same cubicle.
Summary
The addition of the GInventory adds another interesting avenue for organizing and allocating resources for the system to use. The following tutorials support the start of its utilization so I am interested to see how they further use this inventory system to properly maintain control of the resources of the world.