In this tutorial written by Daniel Harabor, you'll find out how to deal with different sized units when pathfinding on a grid, for example in a typical real-time strategy (RTS) game with tanks and foot soldiers. Learn how you can deal with this problem elegantly by using the concept of clearance at each point in the map. Daniel also presents his HAA* algorithm, which helps deal with clearance in a hierarchical manner such that the search remains both efficient and accurate.

The first two days of GDC 2009 featured the inaugural AI Summit, packed with presentations and panels from leading game developers worldwide. The event was a great success, bringing together a mix of AI programmers for a third of the audience, and rest consisted of students, enthusiasts, different types of developers, volunteers, media and other speakers.

These days, it’s becoming much easier to program logic to animate on screen characters. However, that’s only a small part of the challenge of building a game that involves and immerses the player. Actually bringing NPCs to life is something that all AI developers struggle with — and frankly, few succeed…

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While AI is playing an increasingly important role in the games industry these days, games entirely based on AI are few and far between. One in particular though, is Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives (NERO) which was released in 2005 by Kenneth Stanley and his team at the University of Texas at Austin, and totaled over 100,000 downloads. NERO involved evolving AI bots navigating and fighting in virtual battle grounds.

In game development, the team working on the AI must be one of the most multi-disciplinary of them all. The artist have to build the objects according to a specification so that the AI can use them, the animators create the most important aspect of non-player characters, the AI is often the most complicated part of the design problem, and the level designers and scripters must understand how the AI works in order to create challenging and robust levels. The programming tasks related to the AI are spread along multiple different specialized programmers too, from animation to tools programmers to gameplay programmers — not to mention the AI programmers themselves.