Videos: High level A.I., evasion and formations news - AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron

During the last month we've been mostly silent. But, as any parent will tell you, "a silent child is up to no good".

Fail to acknowledge it, and you are bound to find a room splattered with a mixture of flour and some dubious liquid, as your dog runs wild, blinded by the dirty diapers firmly attached to its head, and with your kid overlooking the whole situation from his strategic position under one of the ceiling fan's blades, from which he's hanging, bottom naked, by the back of his shirt.

While we won't publicly admit to ever have been in that situation, these few weeks have seen some of our hardest work yet.

HIGH LEVEL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Our focus during this period was on the development of the high level A.I. functions. There are so many aspects that were added to the game in this regard, that it's really hard to list them all.

The best we can do is showcase some gameplay where A.I. reacts as a thinking entity, and hope that you'll get the idea.

FLEEING FROM A VEHICLE UNDER ATTACK

In this video you can see our target, an enemy GaZ-67 (a sort of Soviet-built Jeep), moving along a road behind a civilian vehicle.

As the AC-130 Gunship attacks and damages the vehicle, the enemy decides to floor it. But when their ride is knocked out of service, they bail out and run for cover in random directions.

When that 20mm High-Explosive ammo hits next to them, some decide to hit the dirt, while others try to run away from it. And one of them gets real lucky... for a while.

FORMATIONS

The backbone of the Soldier's AI are what we call Formations, that group soldiers into performing tasks to achieve set objectives.

Each formation spawned into the scene has a set of missions, that range from patrolling a number of waypoints, to escorting other units or defending an area against enemy attacks.

As in real life, these formations are physically arranged to best adjust to the current objective. For example, a group that is marching towards an objective along a road will use a column or staggered-column formation. A group that is expecting enemy contact ahead will use a wedge or line formation.



In this video, you can see an enemy group switching from staggered column to wedge formation as they march towards their objective. When the AC-130 attacks, the formation disbands as soldiers start running for their lives, while trying to stay relatively close to each other.


More videos, several orders of magnitude more epic than these ones, are coming up in a few days. Stay tuned!