Im implementing a pool billiard game in Java and it all works fine. It is a multiplayer game, but nevertheless, it should also be possible to play it alone. For this purpose I’m trying to implement a simple KI. At the moment, the KI choose just randomly a direction and a random intensity of the impulse (don’t know the correct english word for that). Of course this AI is very poor and unlikely to ever challenge a player.
So i thought about improving the KI, but there are several hard to solve problems. First I thought of just choosing the nearest ball and to try to put it directly into the nearest hole. This isn’t that bad, but if there other balls in the line between, it isn’t really working anymore. Additionally this dosn’t solve te problem of calculating the intensity of the impulse.
So are there any general advice? Or any ideas? Best practices?
How much CPU time and memory does it take to calculate the results of one “move” of the game? Can you afford to analyze more than one move? If it’s relatively cheap to do, just pick N random directions/impulses, calculate the results and pick the best one. You may eliminate some “tricky” cases, when ball goes to pocket after too many collisions. Also, to simplify, you can limit the simulation time for each move (i.e. don’t wait until all the balls stop, just calulate the first T seconds).
This way, you can have computer players of different level – the higher N (and T) correspond to higher play level.