Thursday, November 11, 2021

Slurp'n'Burp

At some point between '97 and '99, my brother suggested that we make a 2-players cooperative (?) pacman clone: Slurp'n'Burp. Of course, by then I had no idea how the original ghosts 'AI' was coded, so I came up with this complex algorithms where every hallway is a sensor.

While the ghosts wanders around the maze, they 'poll' hallways to know whether they have seen a player. If the hallway has seen a player, it can tell which direction to go, the ghost then goes hunting; at corners, the hunting ghost polls which branching hallway has suggestions to find the player. If none has, the ghost is "lost". It picks a branch, goes to the other side of it and polls again. if nothing works, it takes back the route it had found and picks another branch. 

I have no clue whether it would have worked, as I've never coded more than the sound configuration menu of Slurp 'n Burp. The actual pacman AI is much more cleaner and elegant, of course. (and has been extensively discussed, including here

Of course, my bro's blog has precise logging of when it happened, since he immediately wrote songs for it and logged the date.  knowing that Greedy is out in September '97 and that we track demoscene pretty frequently through #PossePresse magazine at that time, I still think it is perfectly possible that Eclipse prod inspired us.

(recovered from tweets posted in November 2021)

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