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The latest generation of consoles presents an opportunity for studios to opt for quantity over quality, by adding many more characters in their games than was previously possible. These crowds can have a dramatic impact on both gameplay and the overall experience. This article looks at how you can simulate large numbers of […]

In any part of your game, as the design gets more complex you’ll find it increasingly hard to build the logic to implement it. Whether it’s animation control, movement, individual orders, squad behaviors, level scripting, or game logic you’ll find the same problems as the system gets bigger.
The question is, how do you […]

Quake 3 Arena makes for interesting study as it is fully open-source (except the tools), and the code contains a feature-complete death-match bot AI written in plain-old C; it’s surprisingly easy to follow when you understand the syntax of the language. As well as a simple goal architecture, you’ll find some solid technology in the Area Awareness System (AAS) and the pathfinding solution too (a.k.a. routing).

This article looks into the latest SDK behind F.E.A.R., the hit first-person shooter acclaimed for its artificial intelligence. A majority of the AI code is available as part of the game source, and notably its famous STRIPS planner written by Jeff Orkin.

This week’s Thursday Theory post on AiGameDev.com looks into applying reinforcement learning to bridge the gap between animation control and high-level AI logic. Specifically, this review covers autonomous characters that learn to move in a dynamic world, as developed by Leslie Ikemoto from the University of Berkeley.

What are rapidly-exploring random trees and how can they be a applied to games? This article looks at the theory behind this algorithm, and shows how it can be applied in practice — including to animation, navigation graph generation, and motion planning.

This review explains one of the more recent innovations in path-finding to deal with greater numbers of actors and larger dynamic worlds. In particular, HP-A* (pronounced “A Star”) is capable of reducing memory usage and the cost of searching for an optimal path by automatically generating a hierarchical representation of the navigation grid.

Saturday’s here so it’s time for some Smart Links from around the web! There are 9 interesting game AI links for you this week. Thanks everyone for your submissions. Also note the new splash screens for this category :-)

Also, I’ve put up a little Tumbleblog over at news.AiGameDev.com, which features all […]

Let’s say your FPS bot needs to go to multiple places to pickup ammo, a weapon, and a health pack. How do you make sure the pathfinding takes into account the location of each object to provide the best overall path, rather than wander around picking up each object individually?