1st Edition
Game AI Pro 2 Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals
Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals presents cutting-edge tips, tricks, and techniques for artificial intelligence (AI) in games, drawn from developers of shipped commercial games as well as some of the best-known academics in the field. It contains knowledge, advice, hard-earned wisdom, and insights gathered from across the community of developers and researchers who have devoted themselves to game AI.
In this book, 47 expert developers and researchers have come together to bring you their newest advances in game AI, along with twists on proven techniques that have shipped in some of the most successful commercial games of the last few years. The book provides a toolbox of proven techniques that can be applied to many common and not-so-common situations. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers. Beginners will find good general coverage of game AI techniques and a number of comprehensive overviews, while intermediate to expert professional game developers will find focused, deeply technical chapters on specific topics of interest to them.
- Covers a wide range of AI in games, with topics applicable to almost any game
- Touches on most, if not all, of the topics necessary to get started in game AI
- Provides real-life case studies of game AI in published commercial games
- Gives in-depth, technical solutions from some of the industry’s best-known games
- Includes downloadable demos and/or source code, available at http://www.gameaipro.com
General Wisdom
Game AI Appreciation, Revisited; Mike Lewis and Kevin Dill
Combat Dialogue in FEAR: The Illusion of Communication; Jeff Orkin
Dual-Utility Reasoning; Kevin Dill
Vision Zones and Object Identification Certainty; Steve Rabin
Agent Reaction Time: How Fast Should an AI React?; Steve Rabin
Preventing Animation Twinning Using a Simple Blackboard; Michael Dawe
Architecture
Possibility Maps for Opportunistic AI and Believable Worlds; John Manslow
Production Rules Implementation in 1849; Robert Zubek
Production Systems: New Techniques in AAA Games; Andrea Schiel
Building a Risk-Free Environment to Enhance Prototyping: Hinted-Execution Behavior Trees; Sergio Ocio Barriales
Smart Zones to Create the Ambience of Life; Etienne de Sevin, Caroline Chopinaud, and Clodéric Mars
Separation of Concerns Architecture for AI and Animation; Bobby Anguelov
Optimizing Practical Planning for Game AI; Éric Jacopin
Movement And Pathfinding
JPS+: An Extreme A* Speed Optimization for Static Uniform Cost Grids; Steve Rabin and Fernando Silva
Subgoal Graphs for Fast Optimal Pathfinding; Tansel Uras and Sven Koenig
Theta* for Any-Angle Pathfinding; Alex Nash and Sven Koenig
Advanced Techniques for Robust, Efficient Crowds; Graham Pentheny
Context Steering: Behavior-Driven Steering at the Macro Scale; Andrew Fray
Guide to Anticipatory Collision Avoidance; Stephen J. Guy and Ioannis Karamouzas
Hierarchical Architecture for Group Navigation Behaviors; Clodéric Mars and Jérémy Chanut
Dynamic Obstacle Navigation in Fuse; Jan Müller
Applied Search Techniques
Introduction to Search for Games; Nathan R. Sturtevant
Personality Reinforced Search for Mobile Strategy Games; Miguel A. Nieves
Interest Search: A Faster Minimax; Jeff Rollason
Monte Carlo Tree Search and Related Algorithms for Games; Nathan R. Sturtevant
Rolling Your Own Finite-Domain Constraint Solver; Leif Foged and Ian Horswill
Tactics, Strategy, and Spatial Awareness
Looking for Trouble: Making NPCs Search Realistically; Rich Welsh
Modeling Perception and Awareness in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist ; Martin Walsh
Escaping the Grid: Infinite-Resolution Influence Mapping; Mike Lewis
Modular Tactical Influence Maps; Dave Mark
Spatial Reasoning for Strategic Decision Making; Kevin Dill
Extending the Spatial Coverage of a Voxel-Based Navigation Mesh; Kevin A. Kirst
Character Behavior
Infected AI in The Last of Us; Mark Botta
Human Enemy AI in The Last of Us; Travis McIntosh
Ellie: Buddy AI in The Last of Us; Max Dyckhoff
Realizing NPCs: Animation and Behavior Control for Believable Characters; Jeet Shroff
Using Queues to Model a Merchant’s Inventory; John Manslow
Psychologically Plausible Methods for Character Behavior Design; Phil Carlisle
Analytics, Content Generation, and Experience Management
Analytics-Based AI Techniques for a Better Gaming Experience; Truong-Huy D. Nguyen, Zhengxing Chen, and Magy Seif El-Nasr
Procedural Content Generation: An Overview; Gillian Smith
Simulation Principles from Dwarf Fortress; Tarn Adams
Techniques for AI-Driven Experience Management in Interactive Narratives; Vadim Bulitko, Greg Lee, Sergio Poo Hernandez, Alejandro Ramirez, and David Thue
Index
Biography
Steve Rabin has been a key figure in the game AI community for over a decade and is currently a principal software engineer at Nintendo of America. After initially working as an AI engineer at several Seattle start-ups, he managed and edited seven game AI books in the Game AI Pro series and the AI Game Programming Wisdom series. He also edited the book Introduction to Game Development and has over two dozen articles published in the Game Programming Gems series. He has been an invited keynote speaker at several AI conferences, founded the AI Game Programmers Guild in 2008, and founded the Game Developers Conference (GDC) AI Summit, where he has been a summit adviser since 2009. Steve is a principal lecturer at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, where he has taught game AI since 2006. He earned a BSc in computer engineering and an MS in computer science, both from the University of Washington.
