Game AI Pro 3

5

Six Factory System Tricks for Extensibility and Library Reuse

Kevin Dill

5.1    Introduction

5.2    Background

5.3    Trick #1: Abstracting the Data Format

5.4    Trick #2: Encapsulating the Initialization Inputs

5.5    Trick #3: Consistent Object Construction and Initialization

5.6    Trick #4: Injecting External Code into the AI

5.7    Trick #5: Using Templates and Macros to Standardize Factory Definitions

5.8    Trick #6: Global Object Configurations

5.9    Conclusion

References

5.1  Introduction

These days, many games employ a data-driven AI. In other words, the decision-making logic for the AI is not hardcoded in C++ but instead is placed in a configuration file (generally using XML or some similar format) and loaded at runtime. This ...