This 3rd edition is set to be the most controversial — yet fascinating — Annual Awards for Game AI! Let me clarify. The whole procedure, including the nominations and the voting, is done by the community here at AiGameDev.com. Of course, there's a certain editorial process involved in picking the nominees, but the rest is mechanical and just a question of collecting the results.

What common mistakes do new AI engineers make when they first move into game development? How long does it take for them to realize that designers will find edge cases in the code no matter what? And why do all public discussions about game AI end up with programmers complaining about designers? We have the answers, and they are below...

In December for the past couple years, AiGameDev.com has hosted The Game AI Awards to celebrate the games that came out over the previous twelve months — and particularly those with great artificial intelligence. This time it's a bit different, however...

Finite-state machines have been getting a lot of bad press over the past couple years, and justifiably so! When applied to AI for building purposeful goal-directed behaviors, traditional FSMs just don't scale very well. This is the main reason developers in the games industry have been primarily moving towards systems like behavior trees instead...

Most AI systems in the games industry focus on short-term reactive memory and combat behaviors applying techniques such as behavior trees.  However, there seems to be little support for long-term memory, for example remembering locations in space that mark events that occurred.  In our daily lives, we internally map, model and remember our surroundings and experiences.  This begs the question, how can we similarly organize and leverage longer-term memory within modern AI?

Since Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2, the feature of the AI Director 2.0 that grabbed the most attention has to be the dynamically changing level geometry. Apparently the game can not only control the weather patterns, but it can also change the route the survivors take while moving through the world.

Of all the game modes in Left 4 Dead, Survival has some of the most interesting dynamics from an AI perspective. From the initial concept, to survive as long as you can with help of your four buddies, the game mode quickly turns into a process of finding optimal locations in the map to defend...