At the Paris Shooter Symposium last year, the BULLETSTORM team made a great impression on many of the AI programmers and developers in the audience. Each of the system they showed, taken on their own, push the boundaries of what's been done before in games. However, the game hasn't met commercial success, which led to the question whether the game was over-engineered...

Every year at GDC, the AI Dinner takes place on Friday and as a tradition, all the tables in the restaurant are covered with paper to scribble on during heated debates and arguments. In previous years, we discussed and solved many interesting problems... This time, however, was the most controversial of them all!

Every year AiGameDev.com runs its Awards for Game AI, shining the spotlight on the best releases of the past year. There are six different awards, ranging from technology to design and of course overall game of the year. For each, we've included the community vote results as well as the editor's choice.

First-person shooters have a reputation for driving graphics technology, and it's no different for AI. Many notable innovations of the past few years have come from FPS games — including the AI Director from LEFT 4 DEAD, the STRIPS-planner from F.E.A.R. the HTN planner in KILLZONE 2, etc. With the latest wave of shooters being released in Q1 & Q2 2011 (e.g. CRYSIS 2, BULLETSTORM, BRINK) there's no better time to stop and take a look at which challenges are still ahead of us.

With 2010 starting to fade away in the rear view mirror, there's no better time to announce the winners of this year's AiGameDev.com Awards for Game AI. The games are still fresh in everyone's minds, the votes are in, and everything is set for another year of innovative and fun game AI.

Every year, I write an analysis of the past year's trends and break down predictions from 12 months ago to see how accurate they were. Without fail people ask me whether much has happened during the last 12 months in game AI. But after spending a few weeks going through news and events, I always come to the conclusion there's way more than meets the eye! Last year was quite an incredible year for artificial intelligence in games, and this year is living up to those high standards.

2009 has been a very important year for game AI as a discipline, possibly one of the most significant yet. I feel a bit less guilty about struggling to keep up with everything just looking at how fast our field is moving!

This 3rd edition is set to be the most controversial — yet fascinating — Annual Awards for Game AI! Let me clarify. The whole procedure, including the nominations and the voting, is done by the community here at AiGameDev.com. Of course, there's a certain editorial process involved in picking the nominees, but the rest is mechanical and just a question of collecting the results.

These days, it’s becoming much easier to program logic to animate on screen characters. However, that’s only a small part of the challenge of building a game that involves and immerses the player. Actually bringing NPCs to life is something that all AI developers struggle with — and frankly, few succeed…