How do you make computer lose in a pong game?

Question

So me and my partner are trying to make a pong game that's player vs. computer, but we just couldn't figure out how to make the computer lose.

We already have the basic stuff done and it works fine but the computer just never loses. And we also tried slow down the computer peddle using sleep, but whenever the paddle moves slow, the ball also moves slow.

any advice would help! Thanks

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered May 13 '11 at 13:17

5

And we also tried slow down the computer peddle using sleep, but whenever the paddle moves slow, the ball also moves slow.

You need to make it slower by moving it a shorter distance each time it moves.

answered May 13 '11 at 13:17

Dan Byström

9,067
5
38
68

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 13 '11 at 14:47

In the original Pong game, the paddle was perfectly in sync with the ball, that is whenever the ball went down a line, the paddle did too. Obviously, that would make the game unwinnable so the solution used by the developers was to skip an update cycle every few cycles.

In layman's terms, on every frame, you adjust the paddle's location to follow the ball, except on the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, etc. By doing that, your paddle will seem to follw the ball nicely, but with some kind of delayed reaction.

Source: Racing the beam. I unfortunately don't remember the exact number of frames between skips, but you'd need to adjust anyway. — 3Doubloons, May 13 '11 at 14:48

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 13 '11 at 13:16

I assume that the computer never loses because it "knows" where the ball is going to go. In that case, why can't you make it go to the wrong place some percentage of the time?

As well, if you just wanted to slow it down, rather than sleeping, you could intersperse "moves" of "don't go anywhere" along with the movement towards what it thinks is the right place to be. So instead of "down 1, down 1, down 1", you could have "down 1, down 0, down 0, down 1, down 0, down 0..." or something along those lines.

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:18

1

I think there is a game site for problems like this https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/. But my answer would be to try and cycle the top speed of the AI bat. And to make the bat short sited. (Only respond to the ball position once it is in its half.)

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:18

Community

1
1

answered May 13 '11 at 13:16

Charles Beattie

5,739
1
29
32

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered May 15 '11 at 06:39

Computer must make mistakes to lose. The catch is, the mistake must be realistic. If the mistakes seems too artificial, the human player loses interest after a while. The human must believe the cause of the mistake is his good play.

The computer may occacionally react late. I mean, freezes when the human hit the ball. This may especially happen if the human hit the ball with the edges.
Intentional going slow would be unrealistic. But sometimes the computer may go a little bit slower while defending a ball that would bounce.
The computer may plain react to wrong side (for example, go up instead of down) when the ball hit with the middle of the bat.
The computer may wait a ball at the wrong place (off by 1), especially if the ball would bounce.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered May 13 '11 at 13:25

When you use Sleep the whole program stop for some milliseconds. Do you have a game loop ? If so, try decreasing the translation amount, and do not forget to normalize the acceleration vector.

cpuPadlle.Position += amount * acceleration;

Where :

amount in [0..1]
acceleration is a 2d vector

How do you make computer lose in a pong game?

6 Answers6