Entries from September 2007

In the previous sketches, you learned what a behavior lookup table looks like in practice, and how it can grow very quickly in size as you add more variables to the problem.
The way to reduce complexity in practice is to “divide and conquer” by breaking down the table into smaller parts. To do […]

This Saturday, there are many Smart Links for you to browse. If you have news or announcements, be sure to send them in.

Since there were no questions about game AI this week, I’m going to ask myself one! Spare me the embarrassment of doing this next week by contacting me with your queries.
An obviously astute reader (hehe :-) asks “Why are you so harsh with finite state machines? Don’t game developers use them all […]

The Thursday Theory post this week takes another whitepaper from from the Symposium on Interactive 3D Games and Graphics 2007 that’s helpful for game AI, and breaks it down into the basic ideas. See the previous post in this series for more about character animation.
This second entry is from the University of California and […]

Developing games is difficult. Gameplay and AI are particularly tough as the process is most similar to making art. The games industry has been trying to develop this skill for years with varying degrees of success.
This article launches a weekly series covering The Core: a set of principles and methods to help create […]

The developer discussion this week is about the missing ingredient in game AI. How can we improve the quality of AI in mainstream games? If you had to focus on one ingredient, what would it be?
Click here to join the conversation by posting a comment, and stand the chance of winning a T-shirt […]

The Total War series revolutionized strategy games by letting the player control thousands of foot soldiers, archers, and cavalry. The engine uses innovative ideas to build an AI scalable enough to support this kind of gameplay, and offer such depth and replayability. This article looks into the technology behind the game.