PacMan and related games

Off-Topic
1

Does anyone know (or know of a site) the details of how the “ghosts” in Pacman decide to move?

  • do they make a random turn when they hit a wall?
  • do they randomly change direction without hitting walls?
  • are they move related to Pacman’s location (ie. some semi-smart tracking?)
  • some other smart or semi-smart alogrithm?

This isn’t specifically about Pacman, just using that as an exmple

I’ve been all over the net and can’t find anything specific

2

Hey Dave, not sure if this helps

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/ghosts-pac-man-work/

3

I made a MsPacman clone and I think one of these links had the ghost behavior I used

http://spyhunter007.com/the_1983_ms_pacman_bozeman_montana_think_tank.htm
http://donhodges.com/pacman_pinky_explanation.htm
http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

4

Thanks… didn’t realize that those ghosts had so much going for them :slight_smile:

5

This is a good read, too :

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossier.php?print=1&utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fun

6

Yes, this was a valuable, if not the most valuable link when making my clone but couldn’t find it. I remember spending days on the part about ‘cornering’. ('< • • • •

7

It never ceases to amaze me how ordinary players find out such complex bugs or idiosyncrasies just through playing the game. Probably says more about me than them …

8

It could be from looking at the source. I got the source from someplace, written in assembly for MariaOS; made sense of parts but ultimately didn’t help me much.

9

I thought the bit about 2pixels before/after on the corning was interesting… my app is not a PacMan clone, but the concepts are similar… but the method I used has a message queue… so the users says go right, but the actor is not centered on a tile, the message goes to an event queue… this queue is processed everytime the actor is “centered”… and so far it feels right in test play, the main actor will have a bit of an advantage still as the enemy won’t even evaluate their move until they are centered.