Saturdays at AiGameDev.com are dedicated to rounding up Smart Links from around the web. This week isn’t as busy as last week, but there were some great annoucements! Be sure to contact me if you have any news or tips for next week.
Remember there’s a mini-blog over at news.AiGameDev.com (RSS) with game AI news from the web as it happens.
NARS Open Sourced
Pei Wang this week cut through the usual noise on the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) mailing list by announcing an open source version of his NARS system, a promising logic-based reasoning system.
“What makes this system different from conventional reasoning systems is its ability to learn from its experience and to work with insufficient knowledge and resources. NARS attempts to uniformly explain and reproduce many cognitive facilities, including reasoning, learning, planning, etc, so as to provide a unified theory, model, and system for AI as a whole.”
His approach is very well documented in white papers, and there are some lessons to be learned for anyone working with planners.
Simulation and Story Analysis
Ethan Kennerly has written a paper on Open Problems in Simulation and Story Analysis for the AISB symposium mentioned last week. It’s not available yet, but Ethan has posted all the references on his blog. (What’s up with citing Wikipedia in scientific papers?)
Simulation and Story Analysis, interactive.usc.edu
Driving Crysis
Dave Mark wrote some observations about the AI in Crysis on his blog:
“It’s a shame that Crytek got so close and so convincing on some things — but has such massive gaping holes in others.”
There’s even a video posted a few months ago showing the problems of integrating scripts with autonomous AI. It’s not very flattering.
These problems go a long way in justifying why Crysis wasn’t nominated for Best Game AI of 2007. Details matter!
Post-Play’em - Observations on Game AI: Driving Crisis in Crysis, intrinsicalgorithm.com
Adaptive Difficulty - Friend or Foe?
hyperionecta writes about adaptive difficulty in games, in particular using AI:
“Another form of Adaptive difficulty is realistic A.I featured in many of the top shooter games of today. Enemies will notice you in cover and throw grenades or they’ll see a back alley and flank you. The A.I is becoming smarter and smarter leading to real challenges for any gamer.”
Adaptive Difficulty - Friend or Foe?, dimorphic360.wordpress.com
The Art of Throwing Grenades
In an article about WYSIWYG design for Gamasutra, Andrew Doull mentions the problems of handling grenades:
“Grenades are one of those problematic game conventions, that increase the game design difficulty, without necessarily providing equivalent fun. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl does not let the enemies throw them at all due to implementation issues with the AI - one of the features of Clear Sky is that this capability has been added.”
The State Of WYSIWYG Game Design, gamasutra.com
A Simple Genetic Algorithm in Python
Sean Ross has contributed a simple GA as a recipe to the ASPN Cookbook. The client code looks somewhat like this:
import genetic
NOT LOGGED IN
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