{"id":92,"date":"2008-04-16T13:25:08","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T18:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/16\/real-ai-for-games\/"},"modified":"2016-06-09T08:23:35","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T13:23:35","slug":"real-ai-for-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/16\/real-ai-for-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Real AI for Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Dave Mark’s post on Why Not More Simulation in Game AI?<\/span><\/a> and the comments it elicited are right on the money about the correlation between lifespan and intelligence of supposedly intelligent adversaries in first person shooter (FPS) games.\u00a0 It is extremely refreshing to hear advanced gamers agreeing that more intelligent, longer-lived characters would keep a game more interesting and engaging than current FPS.\u00a0 This is exactly consistent with my experience with one of my employers who delivers intelligent agents for the military.\u00a0 The military calls them “computer generated forces” (CGFs).\u00a0 The idea is that these things need to be smart and human enough to constitute a meaningful adversary for training purposes (i.e., “serious games”).\u00a0 Our agents fly fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft or animate special operations forces (SOFs) on the ground.\u00a0 (They even talk – with humans – over the radio.\u00a0 I love that part.\u00a0 It makes them seem so human.)<\/p>\n

Of course, they get to demonstrate this intelligence only because they are not shot up or blown to bits within seconds!<\/p>\n

Here’s where AI in games is headed (from the perspective of a behavior leader in serious games):<\/p>\n

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  1. Real AI is being embedded with gaming milddleware to animate non-player characters (NPCs) with much higher human-like fidelity.<\/li>\n
  2. Human performance modeling, including emotion, is being enhanced within the cognitive models of CGFs and will show up next in NPCs.<\/li>\n
  3. Crowd animation is becoming much more sophisticated and moving to center stage in role-playing games (RPGs).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The first step involves embedding a rule-based or similar cognitive architecture in game AI middleware.\u00a0 These days, game AI middleware is pretty much about path planning and finite-state machine (FSM) modeling of agent behavior.\u00a0 That is, it is not knowledge based and has all the limitations on context-sensitive and complexity that you would expect if you were hard-coding in C++ (Java is out since the middleware has to support the Xbox and the Playstation, as well as Microsoft Windows and Linux, in some cases.)\u00a0 The FSM approach has been played out to its limit with hierarchical task networks.<\/p>\n

    For a look at some of this software, see:<\/p>\n