Help Needed for Paintball Game

[frankiebaby]

Ok, so heres the deal:

i have been working on a paintball game, Comic Paintball Blast. You Basically pick a character, set your time/sound/ammo stuff and then play. You shoot paintballs at your opponent. You can 'hide' behind objects, bushes, trees whatever. heres a demo, 140Kb, self extracting ZIP, http://www.keeponrockin.cjb.net/CPBINST.EXE. IT's really pretty neat.

Here's the problem :

So far, its only a two-player game, which, for obvious reasons, stinks. its hard to explain why its hard to make it one player until you see the demo (up there ^ sumwhere). I made it really simple at first, basically made the computer player follow the human player, but of course with objects in the way, it maeks it easy to take advantage of the poor idiot-computer, getting him/her/it stuck behind an object. i need to have him/her/it effectively go around the objects, without running over any others in the proccess. i have these variables

P1INFO.X    'player 1 (human) X location
P1INFO.Y    'player 1 (human) Y location

P2INFO.X    'player 2 (computer) X location
P2INFO.Y    'player 2 (computer) Y location

type object
   X as integer
   Y as integer
   Length as integer
  Width as integer
  Type as integer
end type

OBJECTS(1 to 5) object

so basically, knowing how wide the object is, and its and the computer locations, it easy to tell if, and where, ur touching an object. the problem is getting him to go around the object properly, the 'sensitive areas' always overlap in some way, cuasing him to think that he's hitting a corner when he's not, or seeing a corners the wrong way, or getting trapped entirley in them


 Everything else has been finished, include ability to download more backgrounds and characters, i only need to finish the 1 player mode. Then i can work on updating other stuff, which you can find at http://WWW.RENEGADESOFTWARE.CJB.NET

If ANYONE  has ANY ideas, PLEASE let me know!!
    Im willing to send snippets of my source code to get this solved, and of course, all due credit will be given in final program.

[GaMe-BoX]

Yo.. i dont have a real solution to the prob since there is probably required some tweaking to it before you can solve it, but when i build maps i use to make a squaregrid, and have an array for example map1(20,20) to represent the map, like map1(x,y) and then its easy to find and move around with a ai, you kan make a second layer map with waypoints for the ai player to follow, with each floor grid pointing to all possible directions from that particular grid, so the ai knows easily where he can go, and not go...

[frankiebaby]

I see what your sayin, i like that idea, and i'd have sum ideas to get that to work, unfortunately, i dont have tiles, but i have no scrolling so its ok (really simple-like game). I may try to use that idea though, but there is another problem, and that is that the objects are placed randomly every time the level is built, so id need to make sumtin to fill that array based on the arrangement, i also dont really wanna have an array of 320 by 200 if i can help it. but there may be sum other way to get sum kind of "instructions" to the AI, i never really thought of an array for that, thanks a lot! I'll hafta try it out.

[frankiebaby]

Ok well, for an update, I tried some of the Ideas people posted and sum parts worked, so i took the parts of each, and now i got it! I think i finally got the AI done and so all i gotta do is get rid of a few errors in the grafix and finish the "GUI" of the game. Be on the lookout! It should be done soon! Thanks a Lot to all who gave suggestions! Couldnt have done it without ya's!