With increased processing power and better techniques for gathering information from the environment, there's an opportunity to go beyond using raw sensory data and starting to reason about the world. In particular for combat games, simply tracking players then reasoning about their possible hiding location can add a great variety to the behavior.

In his presentation earlier this year, Michiel van der Leeuw talked about “The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World” in which he detailed how the AI for KILLZONE 2 works in practice. Building on top of waypoint cover maps (covered in a previous article), one of their most interesting applications is for tracking threats and predicting their movement — for instance when the player hides from the enemy.

The rest of this article includes a demo video from the game, as well as the slides and a transcript of presentation...

Thanks again to Michiel of Guerrilla Games for sharing his slides with us. Michiel mentioned that the AI department isn't currently looking for programmers, but the company is always on the look out for talented AI, (humanoid) animation and game code enthusiasts.