In this session, Fabio Zambetta discusses the process of applying hybrid control policies (HCB) that combine fuzzy logic and discrete logic to story generation. In particular, he explains how to create the AI of high-level factions that can decide when and why to behave towards each other. The masterclass looks at strategies for controlling the outcome of such simulations, and uses a few examples to illustrate how this can be done in practice.

In this 2h masterclass, Lucas Kovar and Alex Champandard discuss the process of creating a next-generation animation system that's flexible and extensible. The underlying representation is a graph of parametric motions, which are typically created using blending-based approaches, and built using robust tools under the supervision of animators and programmers. The runtime playback section of the talk covers blend trees, transitions between states, locomotion and motion planning. To wrap up, the discussion covers how procedural and physical approaches integrate with such a system.

In this 2h audio panel, John Abercrombie (Lead AI on Bioshock), resident expert Phil Carlisle and Alex Champandard go through the whole production pipeline step by step and identify opportunities for improving the quality and reliability of the AI. In particular, the participants discuss design documents and requirements, asserts and logging, automated testing, runtime controls and visualizations that help identify problems, and a build pipeline that helps reduce issues and empowers the quality assurance team — among others.

In this masterclass, William van der Sterren goes over the whole process of acquiring annotations for a level automatically, from finding a set of waypoints that describe the level by filtering out low quality waypoints and keeping the best, to connecting them together for tactical path-finding, as well as movement annotations. A whole section of the talk is also focused on area clustering, or the process of creating a an extra layer in the navigation hierarchy to support things like squad behaviors and reasoning for groups of soldiers.

In this 2h30 session, Phil Carlisle and Alex Champandard discuss the programming details behind behavior trees, and hierarchical logic in general. Two major approaches are covered: the first implementation relies on modular behaviors that get updated regularly in a polling fashion. Here, all the control flow and memory management is distributed. The second approach is rather more centralized with a scheduler responsible for executing behaviors, and a blackboard that stores the task memories. The relative merits of each solution is discussed and analyzed.