Neural network in racing games

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helloween
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Neural network in racing games

Post by helloween »

Hi folks,
Just to show off my small little coursework project: the possible use of neural networks in car racing games.

It uses :
- Ogre
- ogre newton + simple vehicule class
- a track from "Drive Vehicle Dynamics Demo", posted some months ago on this forum (by Pierre Blanc)
- a neural network class from the book AI for games developer.

I almost did not code anything :)

how it works :
- 5 rays in front of the car are giving the distances from the car to the borders of the track and are used as Input sensors for the ANNET.
- the inputs/outputs pairs are recorded from a player (the output are: move forward, backward, turn right or left)
- the network is trained to adjust all the perceptrons weights with these pairs of inputs/output

results : the ANNET is able to imitate/learn from a player !

I put here only a video since screens wont show anything interresting...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKAULFV8 ... re=related
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NickM
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Post by NickM »

Interesting work, well done.
Five_stars
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Post by Five_stars »

Good!
Do you plan to add another players? It will be great!
And more difficult, of cource, because they have to decide, is it a border of track or player, and have to find a right way for moving.
helloween
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Post by helloween »

thanks!
happy to see that some of you find it interresting :)

I have not planned anything, it was just a simple test / proof of concept, most of racing game use a racing line, the idea here is that ANNET can give emmergeant and maybe more natural behaviours.

But there is a lot of thing to research especially the kind of Input sensors that would have to be used, I was thinking about physX triangle or sphere shapped triggers to detect other cars.

Another investigation would be about the use of evolutionnary ANNET, capable of learning by themself (unsupervised techniques).
Lazare
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Re: Neural network in racing games

Post by Lazare »

helloween wrote:Hi folks,
Just to show off my small little coursework project: the possible use of neural networks in car racing games.

It uses :
- Ogre
- ogre newton + simple vehicule class
- a track from "Drive Vehicle Dynamics Demo", posted some months ago on this forum (by Pierre Blanc)
- a neural network class from the book AI for games developer.

I almost did not code anything :)

how it works :
- 5 rays in front of the car are giving the distances from the car to the borders of the track and are used as Input sensors for the ANNET.
- the inputs/outputs pairs are recorded from a player (the output are: move forward, backward, turn right or left)
- the network is trained to adjust all the perceptrons weights with these pairs of inputs/output

results : the ANNET is able to imitate/learn from a player !

I put here only a video since screens wont show anything interresting...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKAULFV8 ... re=related
you should also reinject output as input or add speed, turning speed etc .. as input

in this way you'll add a little memory to your neural network it will probably smooth the behavior.
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Evak
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Post by Evak »

we did something similar for a racing game. It's not done in Ogre but we have a demo. It works in a similar fashion to yours.

Originaly we had a racing line, but only ended up using it to make sure the cars were driving in the correct direction.

If you want to check it out, theres a 12mb Fun Racer demo on my web page at:

http://www.kineticrealities.com/

The AI is kind of cool, and were hoping to do something similar in ogre when we have time. You can edit parameters in the .ini file. 12 cars work fine on a older 1.2ghz machine

Whats kind of cool with this kind of AI is watching cars make mistakes, and how they try and avoid other vehicles and track side barriers and walls. It's all very convincing and a lot of fun when compared to the usual race on rails of almost all commercial games.
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walaber
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Post by walaber »

cool demo, nice to see some brains attached to the OgreNewt demo car :)
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jordi
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Post by jordi »

If you are more worried about the ANN or AI research than Ogre /visual research, check out Gazebo (yes, I am contributing there, this is an ad :P)
http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/doc/ ... pre1-html/

It is a Ogre and Ode based robot simulator. It has a laser sensor that should work for you as your ray sensors and let you send command ands get info from the world totally in a totally different program than the simulation (useful to work with unrelated code, for instance in your case)

If you are more interested in integrating everything in a game, Good Luck! Let us know your progress!
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