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You might think of zombies as not requiring a very big brain of their own, but you'd be wrong! As Valve quickly found out on LEFT 4 DEAD, getting a zombie to be able to reach the player anywhere in the map is quite a navigation problem... and that's just the start. What better time than Halloween to look into the challenges and future of zombie AI.
This is an audio/video discussion with our resident expert Phil Carlisle and me, Alex Champandard, which was recorded live last year. You'll hear about entity separation and avoidance both from the physical and behavioral perspective, how to create diverse character animations for zombie deaths, how to improve zombie games with different AI mechanics, and finally we discuss LEFT 4 DEAD 2's procedural geometry.
