Game AI Uncovered: Volume Three continues the series with another collection of chapters from 18 of the top game AI professionals and researchers, from around the world. Each chapter includes wisdom, ideas, tips and tricks that were used in the development of video games.
The techniques discussed in these pages cover the underlying development of a wide array of published titles, including Watch Dogs: Legion, City of Gangsters, Eve: Valkyrie, Firefall, The Persistence, Advance Soccer, Alpha Beta Gunner, Luna Abyss, and more.
Contained within this volume are insights that cover a host of different areas within game AI, including vehicle AI, simulating social norms, AI spawning fundamentals, pathfinding, creation of characters using components, animation driven behaviour, tactical positioning in football, automated testing, abstract pattern matching, machine learning for games, and much more.
Beginners to the area of game AI, along with professional developers, will find a wealth of knowledge that will not only help in the development of their own games but will spark ideas for new approaches.
This volume includes chapters written by Dr Allan Bruce, Anuhba Baberjee, Bruno Rebaque, Dale Green, David Wooldridge, Eric S. Le Saux, Greg Irwin, Jason Lok Heng Chin, Johan Holthausen, John Reynolds, Mathias Siemonsmeier, Michele Condò, Dr Nic Melder, Paul Roberts, Phil Carlisle, Richard Bull, Robert Zubek, and Tobias Karlsson.
1. The Vehicle AI of Watch Dogs: Legion: Building a Unified Vehicle AI System for Traffic and High-Speed Chases
Dr Nic Melder
2. Navigating Through a Traffic Intersection: How to Avoid Traffic Chaos When Jumping a Red Light
Dr Nic Melder
3. Building the Tools for Building a City: Semi-Procedural Tools for The Creation of The City Road Network System of Watch Dogs: Legion
Dr Nic Melder
4. Implementing a Simple 3D Waypoint Grid for Efficient Pathfinding in Eve: Valkyrie
Dr Allan Bruce
5. N-Gram for Any Direction Prediction in VR
Michele Condò
6. Creating Characters Using Components
John Reynolds
7. Making AI Play Ball: Building and Testing Football AI
Anubha Banerjee and Greg Irwin
8. Tactical Positioning in the Game of Football
Anubha Banerjee and Greg Irwin
9. Automated Testing for All Developers: How Easy Access Can Make Your Dev Process More Efficient
Matthias Siemonsmeier
10. Abstract Pattern Matching for Strategic Play
Richard Bull
11. Animation Driven Behaviour
Johan Holthausen
12. JP-DRS: Jump-Point Directed Recursion Search
Paul Roberts
13. Machine Learning for Games at Scale
Phil Carlisle
14. Behaviour Engine and Language: A Heterogeneous State Machine System
Eric S. Le Saux
15. AI Spawning Fundamentals: A General Guide to Spawning AI Agents in Games
Bruno Rebaque
16. Character Utility Behaviour Graph
David Wooldridge
Paul Roberts
18. Touchdown! AI Scenarios within American Football
Paul Roberts
19. Creature Navigation in the Air and on the Ground
Jason Lok Heng Chin
20. Debug – Identifying and Presenting Useful Information
Dale Green
21. Not All AIs Are Made the Same
Tobias Karlsson
22. Simulation of Social Norms in City of Gangsters
Robert Zubek
Biography
Paul Roberts is the technical director of the independent game studio Grinning Cat. Prior to this he worked in a variety of Principal / Lead AI Programmer roles for a range of studios in the UK including Sumo Digital, Team17, Traveller’s Tales, Activision, and some smaller indie studios. For several years Paul also led the Games Programming department at Staffordshire University, where he taught Game AI and programming principles. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence, which focused on pathfinding, the development of the DRS algorithm and ways to test the believability of generated paths. Paul has written a number of books, some fiction, others academic, the latest of which is ‘Artificial Intelligence in Games’ published by CRC Press in 2022 and is also the editor for this Game AI Uncovered series.
