Take a journey through the past 12 months in the games industry, and find out where artificial intelligence is becoming a key technology for modern games.
Speakers: Phil Carlisle (Indie Developer at MindFlock Ltd. and veteran programmer on the Worms franchise), Alex Champandard.
My Thoughts
Brief, concise overview of a few games and what talks might relate to them, linked to where I noted the names.
Talk Content
1) Left 4 Dead 2’s bots for survivors
- Interesting as symmetrical to player situation
- Looked at tomorrow morning
2) Simulation Games
- Touch Pet Dogs is really popular
- Need the AI to drive the simulations, Bruce Blumberg talk later today.
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3) Complex Environments
- Mikko Mononen, Local navigation – pathfinding issues
- Alex talking about this too
4) Online/social games
- These, especially AI simulated ones, are good since people can play them forever
- Also caring what is there
- New places to go there too
- Online also allows data mining if improving the game after release. AI can play a role in the data mining.
5) AI for non-character gameplay
- AI director; Left4Dead, Resistance, Silent Hill
- Also data mining again
- Gwaredd Mountain, Silent Hill talk
- Design Tips & Tricks from the Trenches
6) Crowds
- Continuation of crowd AI and social simulations, Heavy Rain, Modern Warfare 2
7) Content creation
- How do you make things that seem hand crafted but are procedurally generated?
- MMO released recently using procedurally generated levels
- Need to build AI for level designers.