AI work in CryEngine 3 Thread

Hi guys,

I'm looking to take on a project for my degree with regards to AI of NPCs in gaming, and trying to improve the experience for players and make AI in general into more human and realistic characters, particularly in terms of fixing the generic AI swarms that operate in unrealistic manners by running off the game state.

I'm looking for a way to actually script behaviour, rather than simply setting up waypoints and relying on built-in functions to deal with the rest, in a similar way to the 2K BotPrize for Unreal Tournament 2004 did a couple of years back, only with different goals overall.

However, I'm still in the preliminary planning stages at the moment and I'm because I'm not constrained by anything except time and my own abilities I'd like to get started as soon as possible and bring the project into as up to date an environment as possible.

Because of this, I'm looking to do this in either Unreal Engine 3 or CryEngine 3, with a preference for CryEngine 3.

What I need to know is is the sort of coding I'd like to do actually possible within the CryEngine environment? I've had a look around the features, and most of the built-in AI work seems to typify what I'm talking about trying to fix, with fairly strict and limited behaviours. I'm assuming that it is possible to achieve what I'm talking about in Unreal through UnrealScript because similar things have been done in the past.

I'd really appreciate if somebody with experience can tell me how flexible and deep you can get into the AI development in CryEngine 3.

Thanks!

So are you trying to make a navigation algorithm that doesnt use waypoints or navmeshes to help guidance? Surely you plan to use some sort of primitive to help describe the game world.

Not exactly, I'm trying to build a full human character-like AI. I will be using constructs from within the engine to help of course, but it's important that I can use a script within CryEngine 3 like Lua or something which gives me much more control than their built-in visual flow-chart system. I just want to know if that exists because I can't find reference to it anywhere within their manual.

Cryengine has LUA support. Of course they also have the C++ SDK if that doesnt expose enough for you.

That's great. Exactly what I needed to know, thanks!