Young - Learning Game AI Programming with Lua

David Young is a professional software engineer who works within the game industry. He started his career at NASA's Deep Space Network and later moved to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Curiosity rover mission. After leaving NASA, he worked on the platform that powers Riot Game's League of Legends . David is pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern California, focusing on graphics research in the field of real-time hair rendering and simulation.

I would like to thank my wife; without her support, this book would not have been possible.

Mitch Allen publishes video games for iOS and Android using Corona SDK and Unity3D. You can find links to his apps at http://mitchallen.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at @mitchallen.

He has worked on web and mobile projects for Lotus, IBM, the New York Times, Caterpillar Inc., Dragon Systems, Dictaphone, Nuance Communications, Yahoo!, Intuit Inc., and a number of startups.

He specializes in software development, automated testing, website performance testing, SDK testing, API testing, and technical writing.

He has served as a technical reviewer for Corona SDK Mobile Game Development Beginner's Guide , Packt Publishing .

Predrag Konar is a game developer and multimedia researcher. His primary areas of interest are games and combining technology and art. He is also into image and audio processing and interactive design and likes to spend his free time painting. In the last 12 years, he has worked as a technical and creative director for many online projects, published over 40 online games, participated in the production of several iOS apps, and worked with Packt Publishing as a technical reviewer on Corona SDK Mobile Game Development Beginner's Guide and Corona SDK Application Design . He has a strong background in Unity, C#, ActionScript, Lua, MEL script, Maya, and Python. He is a member of MENSA and ACM SIGGRAPH.

Bayard Randel is a software engineer at Canonical and is working on the Ubuntu Linux infrastructure. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand. His technical interests include software education with Lua, web development, distributed systems, and functional programming.

Jayant C Varma is an Australian author, developer, trainer, and consultant with a special focus on mobile development and the use of mobile applications in businesses. He is the author of Learn Lua for iOS Game Development and is in the process of authoring another book for Packt Publishing on Xcode 6, apart from a few other books with other publishers. He is the principal consultant at OZ Apps, which is a company he founded. It specializes in mobile business solutions and development-related services.

Jayant has been in the IT Industry for quite a while and has seen things change from 8-bit computers and apps on cassette tapes to present-day mobile devices and app stores. He has always been drawn toward new technologies. He has worked in different domains during his careerwhich have seen him travel to different countriesincluding as the IT manager for BMW dealerships. He has also helped them set up wireless diagnostics in their workshop and contactless key readers at service receptions, and he has also automated the front office (including sales automation, ordering, prospecting, CRM, and so on in the early 2000s). He has also worked as a lecturer at the James Cook University and a trainer for the Apple University Consortium (AUC) and Australian Computer Society (ACS), among others, actively conducting trainings and workshops. He has created several mobile and desktop applications for clients, which are available on the App Store.

He has been a reviewer on more than half a dozen books for Packt Publishing. He can be contacted via his website at http://www.oz-apps.com.

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Preface

Game AI is a combination of decision making and animation playback. Although classic or academic AI is focused solely on finding the right decision to make, game AI is responsible for acting on numerous decisions over time. Treating game AI independent from animation is a classic mistake that this book avoids by integrating animation and locomotion systems immediately into the AI systems. This subtle difference of decision making and execution changes many of the aspects that game AI programmers have to focus on.