Hello everyone.

It's been a few years since I last actually released a project here on Omni. However, recent events have had me revisit one of my old projects.

This is System Crash 2, the second iteration of my 2D Shooter. The original can be found here.

In its current state, the game is still more of a tech demo than anything else. It plays the same as the original version, however there are some changes.

Primarily, there are now two kinds of enemies:
Dumb Bots, which merely move towards the player at a low rate, and
Smart Bots, which are controlled via a Recurrent Neural Network.

As the game progresses, Smart Bots become more adept at killing the player through the application of a genetic algorithm. After each round, smart bots will be chosen either for being able to survive the longest or for dealing more damage to the player than other bots. These bots will then be used to populate the next round, with each offspring being mutated to create potentially new behavior.

As previously stated, the game is still a work in progress. However it is playable. It just doesn't have all the niceties the original had, like a high score or menu.

Controls:
   WASD/Arrow Keys - move
   Space - Sprint
   P/O - Pause/Unpause
   Esc - Reset
   RMB + CTRL - Select Bot to render Brain
   RMB - CTRL - Clear Bot Selection

Here are some ingame screenshots:





The Game is attached to the post.

Known Issues:
    -Title says HuntingBots
    -Weapons not properly balanced
    -Selected Bot does not clear unless player moves

No, it's certainly not. I could try implementing a more laptop friendly control scheme, though

Have an update:
Now pressing CTRL + RMB will select a bot to have its brain rendered to the screen. pressing RMB without CTRL will clear this selection.

Here's a screenshot:


I temporarily set the max number of incoming connections of a node to 5 for this shot, the game itself has around 20 and it does not show too well.

New Issues:
    -Selection will not clear unless Player moves

I will update the first post with this.

Nice! It's cool to see a game with genetic AI. I would suggest a few more genes (circles are nice and all, but...) and a border/resizing (I run XMonad and in fullscreen view it shows the right size but doesn't show me a border).

Resizing will definitely be added once I learn how to do it in JSFML. Or I might just make the game fullscreen. Either work, I suppose.

I also have code to support all the other aspects of genetic algorithms (character sequence of genes, crossover, etc) however I am going to wait until I port this over to C++ before I add new genes. Main reason being, another project I did as a proof of concept for GA trained RNN's is rather inefficient and suffers slowdowns due to Java's Garbage Collector. This game already does too, to some extent.