Rabin Steve - Game AI Pro 3

Game AI Pro 3

Game AI Pro 3

Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals

Edited by

Steve Rabin

CRC Press

Taylor & Francis Group

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Contents

Steve Rabin

John Manslow

Matthew W. Johnson, Fabien Gravot, Shintaro Minamino, Ingimar Hlm Gumundsson, Hendrik Skubch, and Youichiro Miyake

Baylor Wetzel and Kyle Anderson

Kevin Dill

David Young

Sergio Ocio Barriales

Kevin Dill and Christopher Dragert

Anthony Francis

Sumeet Jakatdar

Youichiro Miyake, Youji Shirakami, Kazuya Shimokawa, Kousuke Namiki, Tomoki Komatsu, Joudan Tatsuhiro, Prasert Prasertvithyakarn, and Takanori Yokoyama

David Rez Graham

Mike Lewis

Nicolas A. Barriga, Marius Stanescu, and Michael Buro

Eric Martel

Ingimar Hlm Gumundsson, Hendrik Skubch, Fabien Gravot, and Youichiro Miyake

Chris Jenner and Sergio Ocio Barriales

Graham Pentheny

Ben Sunshine-Hill

Mark Langerak

Daniel Brewer

Steve Rabin and Nathan R. Sturtevant

Nathan R. Sturtevant and Steve Rabin

Mieszko Zieliski

Marius Stanescu, Nicolas A. Barriga, and Michael Buro

Eric Johnson

Baylor Wetzel and Kyle Anderson

Gijs-Jan Roelofs

Sergio Ocio Barriales

David Churchill and Michael Buro

Sebastian Hanlon and Cody Watts

Mieszko Zieliski

Sergio Ocio Barriales

Robert Zubek

Hendrik Skubch

Mike Lewis

James Ryan and Michael Mateas

Jurie Horneman

Ben G. Weber

ric Jacopin

Jeff Rollason

Ian Horswill, Robert Zubek, and Matthew Viglione

Welcome to an all new volume of Game AI Pro! As with each book in this series, I am proud to deliver brand new material from 50 of the top developers and researchers in the field of game AI. With 42 chapters of innovative techniques and algorithms, I am humbled at the goodwill and sharing of wisdom that this work represents. This book is a testament to the generous community of game AI developers as well as the larger game development community. Everyone involved in this effort believes that sharing information is the single best way to rapidly innovate, grow as developers, and continue to move the game industry forward. We sincerely hope that you will benefit from the insights and wisdom held within this book.

This book is divided into six primary sections. In the first section, General Wisdom, we have a selection of techniques that generally apply to all games. In the Architecture section, we further explore modern architectures such as behavior trees and share architectures used in top games such as FINAL FANTASY XV, the Call of Duty series, and the Guild Wars series. In the Movement and Pathfinding section, we explore ways to better smooth paths, avoid obstacles, and navigate 3D space, and present cutting-edge techniques to speed up A* and Dijkstra. The Tactics and Strategy section focuses largely on combat decisions made in a wide variety of genres such as RTS, RPG, MOBA, strategy, and tower defense games. In the Character Behavior section, we look at individual AI behavior such as character interactions, modeling knowledge, efficient simulation, difficulty balancing, and making decisions with case studies from both commercial games (Paragon, Dragon Age Inquisition, and FINAL FANTASY XV) and indie games (Project Highrise and Talk of the Town). Finally, we end with the Odds and Ends section that contains chapters on specialized AI topics ranging from recommendation systems to random number generation and procedural content generation.

Right now, the game AI community is larger than ever and I want to invite you to discover all of the wonderful resources that are available. In addition to reading about new game AI techniques in the Game AI Pro book series, there are annual conferences, which are academic and developer centric, all over the globe. Organized by developers, there is the GDC AI Summit in San Francisco and the Game/AI Conference in Europe. Organized by academia, there is the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) and the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. Outside of events, there are two communities that have also sprung up to help developers. The AI Game Programmers Guild is a free professional group with more than 500 worldwide members (http://www.gameai.com), and there is a wonderful community of hobbyists and professionals at AiGameDev.com. We warmly welcome you to come and hang out with us at any one of these conferences or participate in one of our online communities!

Example programs and source code to accompany the chapters are available at http://www.gameaipro.com.

General System Requirements

The following are required to compile and execute the example programs:

The DirectX August 2009 SDK

DirectX 9.0 compatible or newer graphics card

Windows 7 or newer

Visual C++ .NET 2012 or newer

Updates

Example programs and source code will be updated as needed.