Certainly one of my biggest take aways from the Paris Game AI Conference 2009 was the rise of hierarchical task network (HTN) planning techniques for games. The potential is huge, from helping reduce behavior modelling overheads when creating purposeful behaviors and automatically generating large missions for the player to take part in, both these domains can benefit from HTN planners.

I've been enjoying the OPERATION FLASHPOINT: DRAGON RISING campaign recently. In brief, the game is a large-scale open-world sandbox tactical combat simulation whose feature list would make programmers around the world whimper. The AI does a pretty impressive job considering the challenges!

Building on the incredible success of last year's sell-out event, AiGameDev.com is proud to announce the program of the third annual Game AI Conference in Paris, co-organized with the CNAM where the event is held. This year's conference takes place on June 23rd and 24th 2010, following a workshop about character animation on June 22nd. The schedule blends invited sessions from top AI developers from industry as well as tutorials, reviews and R&D oriented sessions.

The first two days of GDC 2010 featured the second edition of the AI Summit, which brought together a variety of game AI developers from around the world. The bar was set very high for the event, in particular from the previous edition last March, the subsequent Paris Game AI Conference in June, and the increasing focus on the Summits and Tutorials at GDC this year. Generally speaking, the AI Summit 2010 lived up to all these expectations! The room was a bit smaller than last year although with some extra chairs. The sessions were very well attended and the various topics drew in many different groups of GDC attendees.

The first session at GDC's AI Summit features a case study of recent games. This post contains all the references from my presentation about KILLZONE 2's multiplayer bots, and specifically their AI strategy. The project was done under the expert supervision and guidance of Remco Straatman (Lead AI Programmer) along with Tim Verweij, who also established the architecture as part of his thesis.

Last weekend, the Global Game Jam was held worldwide and we took the opportunity to turn it into an AI Marmalade. (For those of you that still don't get the breakfast joke: jam, marmalade. See what I did there?) Part of the AiGameDev.com "team" of contributors was available on Saturday and Sunday — Radu, Richard, and partly Nick — and I (Alex Champandard) made some changes in my usual schedule for the weekend, and we built a stealth game!

The Global Game Jam will take place worldwide this weekend. For those of you participating that are looking for a challenge, fresh ideas to distinguish your game, moral support or help for building your AI, then the AI Marmalade is for you!