I’m pretty sure you were sipping your coffee this morning, casually staring at the ceiling, wondering to yourself: “Why is there no wiki that gathers useful information about game development and artificial intelligence? Surely that’s something the amazing people behind AiGameDev.com would have thought of…” :-) Well, after many requests in the forums and by emails, months of hard work on the design and backend, numerous rumors and endless speculations… it’s finally here! Announcing the AiGameDev.com Wiki — the only one of its kind dedicated entirely to game AI.
In the medium- to long-term, the purpose of the wiki is to build up a repository of knowledge about everything relating to artificial intelligence in games. Here’s the fluffy mission statement from the front page:
“Our goal is to catalog and organize every piece of media across all formats relating to game AI, and even provide unique information on the topic.”
Short-term, over the next few months, the plan is to integrate the various activities of AiGameDev.com’s forums and blog closer with the Wiki (e.g. white papers, reader questions). But the main priority right now is to build up a taxonomy (or ontology) for game AI. This will take the form of a loose hierarchy of concepts, which are categorized in three areas:
Features that you can observe and interact with in-game, i.e. the end-result of using game AI technology.
Techniques that you can implement as algorithms and data structures that help you get the right results.
Methods that you can follow, or guidelines and approaches to help overcome challenges in general.
Since each of these concepts have their own tag, searching for content relating to any topic should be easier than with the current interface — which should be useful when you’re trying to solve a problem on a specific domain or trying to learn about something new. Eventually, the Wiki front page will become the default place to send anyone interested in finding game AI knowledge. (The future redesign of the main page at AiGameDev.com will focus on the site and community instead.)
Anyway, you can find The Game AI Wiki online right here, but here’s the URL for you to visualize and remember so you can go there directly in the future:
http://wiki.aigamedev.com
I’d like to thank my wife Petra for not only doing a great job with the icons and the overall style, but also meticulously adding references to the best white papers on game AI. Also, thanks to Andrew Armstrong for his advice and supervision while I was setting up the whole backend and the theme. Not forgetting Phil Carlisle for his recent suggestions to improve navigability, and Thaspius from the forums for his feedback on layout. (Work in progress still, feedback welcome.) Finally, hats off to the guys behind MoinMoin too for all their help and great work with this powerful wiki software.
Frequent Questions
Why Another Wiki?
With over 1,150 active members, the AiGameDev.com community has grown to a stage where it would really benefit from having a place to store information more permanently. For instance, the wiki repository now contains most of the white papers from the forums, and soon we’ll start gathering frequent questions too…
This already makes things easier to find for us, but if the wiki becomes more useful beyond the community then that’s a bonus!
Who Will Update It?
We have some enthusiastic contributors from the forums already… But here’s the doubly amazing part. First, Andrew Armstrong has kindly accepted the role of editor to supervise the whole thing. (Big thanks to him for volunteering.) Secondly, we’ll be giving out memberships this Autumn to pro-active wiki page authors — so head over there now to get a head start… (Thaspius, you’re in for a freebie when we launch! :-)
