I just came back from the conference on Artificial Intelligence in Paris and because I had such a great experience there, I am sharing some of it.
For those who don’t know about it, I refer you to Alex Champandard’s website aigamdev.com.
Alex somehow manage to get AAA speakers to fly on their dime from around the world and this year we had the AI dev from Bad Company 2, Bruce Blumberg the lead AI for World of Zoo, Mikko Monnonen and Ken Perlin (yes from the perlin noise!).
Mikko’s presentation was the only tech one, yes most others were about workflow or the philosophy and tactics of making AI that feels good. It was about local avoidance. He actually wrote a software to present his stuff, imagine a page that’s 20 screens large, he’d drag that page iphone style as the topic moved from one approach to the next and within the page were LIVE demos of his tech ! I know GUI has little to do with AI but this shows the level of care in this conf. (http://digestingduck.blogspot.com/)
Bruce presentation was very pragmatic and yet bordered on the esoteric with mention of “inner life”. Basically he made some really endearing animals, right, and his focus was on showing a need from the critter, need for the player’s interaction and behaviour we can anticipate. And his technical approach was super simple : decision tree for the behaviour and FSM for the animation. Oh and he made sure we understood that a great part of the connection came from the quality of the animation - I know it sounds obvious but remember most AI people came from a position of doing everything with AI.
I’ll cut this short before it turns into a blog, here is what I got from this awesome conf:
- Start your AI by the simplest rules even if they seem too simple
- center all your decision around the player’s experience, Cheat as needed, in other word, grow a heart and empathize
- go deterministic
- and a lot of these folks use Unity
