Questions about Game AI?

If you have any questions regarding artificial intelligence in video games, you’ve found the right place to ask!

Every Friday on AiGameDev.com is dedicated to reader questions. So here’s your chance to get the answer you’re looking for.

• Are you facing a particularly hard problem in your development?

• Do you want to know how some particular technology is used in industry?

• Is there some AI theory you’d like to learn more about?

Then don’t hesitate and send in your question right now.

The best way to get answer is to subscribe to the blog. Expect a reply within a few weeks — depending on how many other questions have already been asked.

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 […]

Planners are certainly getting more popular in game studios these days, but there’s still a very long way to go before developers reach the same level of understanding as for traditional scripted systems. One area in particular that causes problems is dealing with dynamic situations.
Tobe Mayr, a former colleague and designer at Rockstar, wrote […]

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 […]

While the spotlight for AI in games is often on first-person shooters or real-time strategy games, sports games also present some rather unique challenges and solutions. There certainly isn’t as much research or industry experience available to learn from, but enough to get a good overview of what happens behind closed doors at Electronic […]

Despite all this talk of Open Source, it’s sadly still the case that most software is as “open” as a high-voltage transformer. Even if you manage to download some cryptic source code, you’re in for a bit of a shock unless you know what you’re doing!
Unfortunately, that’s not very good news for anyone wanting […]

Over the last few months, AiGameDev.com has grown into a wonderful little community thanks to you guys! On Fridays, I take the time to answer your questions, either from the blog or the increasingly busy forums.
Finite state machines have become extremely popular over the last decade, and helped game developers build some pretty […]

jjacobsson asks about behavior trees: “What is the root conceptually? How does it deal with events? Is the tree evaluated from the root down to a leaf often / all the time?”
The first thing to note is that behavior trees are rather flexible, so they can be applied in a variety of different ways. […]

After my talk at GDC, a few people wondered what a behavior tree editor actually looks like since I kept mentioning their benefits, including their flexibility and intuitiveness. From my experience with the AI designers at Rockstar, I noticed a boost in productivity of multiple orders of magnitude by providing them with this […]

Every year, chatbot enthusiasts get together and compete in a simplified Turing test. These contests aren’t at the cutting edge of natural language (NL) technology, but this kind of technology is perfectly suitable for mainstream games — both in terms of simplicity to implement and runtime efficiency.

There’s one piece of technology you’re certain to find in most software: a finite state machine. However, they’re almost always implemented differently! In games, there are three major ways to implement FSM in the context of AI, logic, or animation. Naturally, each approach has its own benefits.
This week’s question comes from […]

In most industries, getting your foot in the door is the biggest challenge. In games it can be particularly difficult to get attention from the right people because there’s so much interest from ambitious gamers! Luckily, there are a few recipes for success. This article gives you two approaches and three tips to get started.

Forget research that has no sense of purpose or grounding in the real world. That will get you killed in the information jungle! As a software developer, you have to be more pragmatic. Here are some tips for finding what you need effectively.

As an experienced software developer, do you wonder what it’s like to work with artificial intelligence for games, but can’t be bothered changing careers? Well, here’s how to make sure you never make it in the field of game AI!

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.

Gallius asks “I grew up with games; I’ve been playing them all of my life. My programming knowledge is very limited. Over the last few years I’ve developed an interest in creating my own games. Would you mind pointing me in the direction of some good resources for not only AI, […]

First-person shooters as a genre are making slow progress in terms of tactics, and indeed AI techniques from real-time strategy games would help tremendously. This article looks at games that are bridging the gap, and how you can use different techniques to improve your AI.

Since there were no questions about game AI this week, I’m going to ask myself one! Spare me the embarrassment of doing this next week by contacting me with your queries.
An obviously astute reader (hehe :-) asks “Why are you so harsh with finite state machines? Don’t game developers use them 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?

anthony asks “I’m an aspiring AI Programmer, I’ve written a few small games for college projects and I’ll be doing my MSc thesis soon enough.
I was wondering if you thought it would be a better idea to write my own small game (e.g. a simple variant on CTF in 2D) for testing out various […]

suoju asks “I am a Ph.D. candidate doing research on AI in games. I know it is quite a broad topic, but if you can point me in a direction which I can focus on, I would really appreciate it.”
There are quite a few research topics that involve applying artificial intelligence to games, […]

There are a few things you can do to support multiple threads, whether its the XBox360 or Intel’s multi-core architectures. Luckily, it’s not too difficult to achieve, it just requires good discipline for multi-threaded programming (to avoid deadlocks). Here’s how it’s done most often these days in the games industry.

An agent is embodied if it is subject to biological constraints in its environment. For most games, this means actors are placed inside a body, and can only access information from the world via senses in a realistic way (e.g. using line of sight, in field of view, with potential hearing models). Game developers are always very pragmatic about implementing this.