This Saturday, there are many Smart Links for you to browse. If you have news or announcements, be sure to send them in.
Halo 3’s AI
Halo 3 broke the record for gross revenue on the first day in entertainment history. The reviews are coming in, and they’re rather good; the games meets its expectations! As far as the AI is concerned, feelings are mixed, as Kotaku sums up well:
“The game’s AI was really weird. […] The AI of the good guys is as bad as the AI of the bad guys is good.”
The Age also has an article from their discussions with Damian Isla, the Lead AI Programmer on the game.
Kotaku’s Halo 3 Review, kotaku.com
Bungie’s Halo Hordes a Huge Jump Forward, theage.com
Screenshot: Master chief in battle in Halo 3.
The Joy’s Of Developing Game AI
An essay from Ryan O’Rourke talks about the joys of seeing a game come to life when AI is integrated into the world. Every game AI programmer should be able to relate to this!
Two Pleasures of Gameplay Integration, thinglefin.com
Everything about Lua Programming
S Kokila wrote an in-depth introduction to Lua scripting last month. Lua is a dynamically typed, easily embedded programming language, used by World of Warcraft and Far Cry, among many other games these days.
Introduction to Lua Programming, scratchprojects.com
AI Programming Job Opportunity
Byron Rupp sent word that his company is looking for people:
“We are developing a Quake 3 game for release in January of 08. We can hire full or part-time.
I was wondering if you had any ideas regarding how we should go about finding an AI programmer to help finish up some rough edges.”
Video: Trailer of a previous Half-Life 2 mod, IronGrip.
ISOTX homepage, isotx.com
On Soccer and Genetic Programming
Gamasutra is also running a piece about using evolutionary algorithms to evolve football AI. They use a binary decision tree to represent the behaviors of each team member.
Using Genetic Programming To Evolve Soccer Teams, gamasutra.com
Game Entity Management
Managing the entities inside the game world efficiently is critical to create good AI… The GD Algorithms list has an interesting discussion on the subject, notably about using “orthogonal lists” or boost’s multi_index data structure.
Entity Management, Messaging and Traversal, sourceforge.net
Concurrent Programming Paradigms
For those of you that are even more interested in theoretical computer science and concurrency, Lambda The Ultimate has an interesting discussion about Software Transaction Memory, and whether it should be used or not to address problems like updating game logic concurrently.
Is Software Transaction Memory a Bad Thing?, lambda-the-ultimate.org
Enjoy!
