Talking 'Bout Game AIs

Steven sent over an interview Feedmag has got with the lead AI programmer for Black & White. He talks about some of the creature/villager routinues in the game, which is interesting for the game, but also interesting in terms of how much the world of AIs for games has changed in the last few years.

Comments

Re:Graphics, AI, and the Gaming Industry

[r]

Academia needs to make it more widely known to the software industry that stuff like this has been available.

academia has been trying. :)

there are (at least) two big problems in migration of ideas from research into development.

1. time scales. as one developer put it, "if i want to use a new AI technique in a game, i have about two weeks to research it, and a month to implement it. any more than that, and i won't be able to justify the time spent on it to my boss."

this is pretty standard in the industry, btw. otoh, it would take a skilled ai programmer easily more than a month-and-a-half to implement and debug an inference engine in C++. and you can forget about something like writing a compiler for building behavior-based networks - that takes too much time.

2. different priorities. academic AI traditionally focuses on different things that games. in academia, working systems matter, but they're vehicles for the theories and techniques, which are the real crux of the matter. the programs can be slow, and they can consume vast resources, as long as they provide a novel insight into how human mind or human behavior works.

games, otoh, run under tight performance constraints (ie. in a 30fps game, even with 10% of cpu available to AI, you have 3.3 milliseconds per frame to do all of your AI, including collision detection and pathfinding!), and its goal is not scientific insight, but believability - the creatures can be dumb as buttons, and they can be directed by simple finite state machines, so long as they look like they're doing something cool.

with such different goals, it's not clear what can be done to bring the two closer together. for now we can just hope that if more game developers had formal training in AI techniques (as opposed to learning AI by hacking FSMs or NNs or whatever the fad-of-the-day is), and more academics were aware of constraints of the gaming industry, it would foster a better cooperation and exchange of ideas...

It works well here, but be careful claiming this is anything bigger than excellent game AI using well-known techniques.

amen to that.