I'm just starting on adding AI to a side scroller beat-em-up game.  I've found tons of AI resources on puzzle games and first-person shooter games, but haven't found much on the side scroller fighting type games.  Has anyone on here had more success with one approach over another (i.e.  FSM, FuSM, Messaging, etc.) with this type of game?  I'd just like to get some feedback before I go full into it.  Right now I'm leaning towards a probabilistic FSM approach since the states seem to transition between each other pretty well and probabilities would help cut down repetitive behaviours.

There's no 3D in the game.  The backgrounds are just 256x256 jpeg tile maps...the characters/projectiles are .png images.  I just use 3ds max to make the tiles and sprites.  I don't know exact framerates yet...it runs pretty smooth walking around, but slows down a bit with projectiles...so I probably will have to dumb down the graphics a little (or figure out why my resource management's slowing down the framerate.)  This is still a long ways away from being a full game though.  I just thought I'd share what I was working on.

Thanks for the feedback.  So far I've only been using Java2D...Xalan/Xerces for XML (which I might drop cause the game is not going to be all that massive and it seems overkill).  I've been using 3dsMax/CStudio for all my modeling/animation, then rendering tiles and sprites.

This is really quite a ways away from being playable (or fun to play anyways), but I just wanted to share some screen shots of what I'm working on...so when I ask silly questions you'll know I'm the dork working on the guitarist game.  I haven't posted much, but I read these forums pretty religiously and have gotten so much help out of them...thank you guys.  I haven't touched the code in a few months now because I've been working on graphics too much.  So far I only have two characters and two levels...you can walk around, jump, and attack thin air.





Who knows, maybe in a year or so I'll be able to post a webstart link.  In all seriousness though, thanks to the guys on here that take their time to answer everyone's questions!

Well, I suppose I need to re-work my resource manager and do some profiling tests.  Does anyone know about performance issues between having the main class grab the graphics from the other classes and doing all the drawing as opposed to passing the Graphics2D to each class to perform it's own drawing?  I guess I could try both and profile that as well, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what you guys have had the most luck with.  I'm using straight Java2D...sorry Cas, no LWJGL, even though I probably should be using it.

Devon.

Hello everyone.  I've been following these boards for a long time now, but this is my first post.  I'm working on a side-scroller ala Double Dragon / Bad Dudes type and I owe a lot of my solutions to searching the great advice on this board.

Currently, I'm using a method to update graphics and having each class drawing it's own graphics (i.e. map class, character class, resources class), which works pretty well...but not great.  I was wondering if it's faster to do it this way or to have one class grab the images from the other classes and perform all the rendering itself?

Another problem I'm having is the frame rate is fine walking around a level, jumping etc...but comes to a crashing hault when I fire a projectile.  The projectiles are stored in a linked list and a location check is done on each update to remove them from the list once they've left the screen.  Is a location check too much on each update, or is a linked list slow on drawing?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks for the help.

Devon.