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When simulating large crowds, most games can't afford to perform detailed AI simulation on pedestrians, and often randomly generate behavior instead. Even in the very best open-world sandbox games, the pedestrians often wander around without purpose. This approach is fast, but the down side is that cracks quickly show in the NPCs decision making once the player investigates — which completely breaks immersion.

COMMAND OPS: BATTLES FROM THE BULGE is a strategic war game that has a reputation for its simulation detail, famous for its realistic model of command decision-making. It's also considered by fans of the genre as having one of the best operational AI systems even built in such a game, and one of the most advanced in any wargame.

Character animation remains one of the biggest challenges for creating believable NPC behavior, and it's arguably the fastest moving fields of game development. Staying in touch with recent games is one of the best ways to stay on top of trends! What's everyone doing and which patterns are most common? What techniques should you implement in your own games? Where are things going in the near future?

Games such as the classic LEMMINGS or the upcoming PORTAL 2 feature behaviors as explicit concepts in the game that you can manipulate as objects, from setting the behavior of the Lemmings to spraying jump and acceleration paint around the world. In an industry where creative designs can help both AAA and indie titles distinguish themselves, these concepts are a proven yet very under-used technique for adding more depth to the gameplay.

With single player campaigns of first-person shooters expected to last 10h, it's important for the enemy soldiers to exhibit diverse behaviors. You don't want your players getting bored! When there are many enemies on screen, and multiple waves descend on the player's position, this can particularly be a problem. How do you add more variety and diversity to the AI's combat behaviors?

SWORDS & SOLDIERS is a multi-platform 2D sidescrolling RTS game that distills real-time strategy tactics to their very core. The game exhibits all of the traditional challenges for AI, including timing about when to build units, how to balance production of workers vs. combat units, which branch of the technology tree to develop, and which path to send the units on.

As Jay Wilbur once said, "Level Design is where the rubber hits the road." No matter how great your programming or how well designed your NPC behaviors, a level designer can make your work look like the most terrible or amazing AI ever built!

An AI's decisions are only as good as the information it gets, so for things like tactical and strategic reasoning influence maps are a critical component. They help not only at the individual level for picking positions, but also deciding where to attack or build bases. In fact, it's safe to say the more you use influence maps at all levels of your game AI the better it will be overall!

Increasingly, emergence is not enough to build compelling gameplay experiences. You need some kind of monitoring of the player's behavior, allowing you to controlling the game's flow towards states that you know to be fun. That's where AI Directors come in, providing a layer of adaptive logic that improves upon near-random experiences.

Synchronizing characters over the network is a difficult challenge. For player avatars, it requires a very responsive approach that . However, this approach isn't very suited to non-player characters as it consumes unnecessary bandwidth and can result in low-quality animation. RESISTANCE 2 in particular uses a different approach to synchronize the AI decisions over a network.