Game AI Pro 2 Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals

Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals presents cutting-edge tips, tricks, and techniques for artificial intelligence (AI) in games, drawn from developers of shipped commercial games as well as some of the best-known academics in the field. It contains knowledge, advice, hard-earned wisdom, and insights gathered from across the community of developers and researchers who have devoted themselves to game AI. In this book, 47 expert developers and researchers have come together to bring you their newest advances in game AI, along with twists on proven techniques that have shipped in some of the most successful commercial games of the last few years. The book provides a toolbox of proven techniques that can be applied to many common and not-so-common situations. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers. Beginners will find good general coverage of game AI techniques and a number of comprehensive overviews, while intermediate to expert professional game developers will find focused, deeply technical chapters on specific topics of interest to them. Covers a wide range of AI in games, with topics applicable to almost any game Touches on most, if not all, of the topics necessary to get started in game AI Provides real-life case studies of game AI in published commercial games Gives in-depth, technical solutions from some of the industry’s best-known games Includes downloadable demos and/or source code, available at http://www.gameaipro.com

General WisdomGame AI Appreciation, Revisited; Mike Lewis and Kevin DillCombat Dialogue in FEAR: The Illusion of Communication; Jeff OrkinDual-Utility Reasoning; Kevin DillVision Zones and Object Identification Certainty; Steve RabinAgent Reaction Time: How Fast Should an AI React?; Steve RabinPreventing Animation Twinning Using a Simple Blackboard; Michael DaweArchitecturePossibility Maps for Opportunistic AI and Believable Worlds; John ManslowProduction Rules Implementation in 1849; Robert ZubekProduction Systems: New Techniques in AAA Games; Andrea SchielBuilding a Risk-Free Environment to Enhance Prototyping: Hinted-Execution Behavior Trees; Sergio Ocio BarrialesSmart Zones to Create the Ambience of Life; Etienne de Sevin, Caroline Chopinaud, and Clodéric MarsSeparation of Concerns Architecture for AI and Animation; Bobby AnguelovOptimizing Practical Planning for Game AI; Éric JacopinMovement And PathfindingJPS+: An Extreme A* Speed Optimization for Static Uniform Cost Grids; Steve Rabin and Fernando SilvaSubgoal Graphs for Fast Optimal Pathfinding; Tansel Uras and Sven KoenigTheta* for Any-Angle Pathfinding; Alex Nash and Sven KoenigAdvanced Techniques for Robust, Efficient Crowds; Graham PenthenyContext Steering: Behavior-Driven Steering at the Macro Scale; Andrew FrayGuide to Anticipatory Collision Avoidance; Stephen J. Guy and Ioannis KaramouzasHierarchical Architecture for Group Navigation Behaviors; Clodéric Mars and Jérémy ChanutDynamic Obstacle Navigation in Fuse; Jan MüllerApplied Search TechniquesIntroduction to Search for Games; Nathan R. SturtevantPersonality Reinforced Search for Mobile Strategy Games; Miguel A. NievesInterest Search: A Faster Minimax; Jeff RollasonMonte Carlo Tree Search and Related Algorithms for Games; Nathan R. SturtevantRolling Your Own Finite-Domain Constraint Solver; Leif Foged and Ian HorswillTactics, Strategy, and Spatial AwarenessLooking for Trouble: Making NPCs Search Realistically; Rich WelshModeling Perception and Awareness in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist ; Martin WalshEscaping the Grid: Infinite-Resolution Influence Mapping; Mike LewisModular Tactical Influence Maps; Dave MarkSpatial Reasoning for Strategic Decision Making; Kevin DillExtending the Spatial Coverage of a Voxel-Based Navigation Mesh; Kevin A. KirstCharacter BehaviorInfected AI in The Last of Us; Mark BottaHuman Enemy AI in The Last of Us; Travis McIntoshEllie: Buddy AI in The Last of Us; Max DyckhoffRealizing NPCs: Animation and Behavior Control for Believable Characters; Jeet ShroffUsing Queues to Model a Merchant’s Inventory; John ManslowPsychologically Plausible Methods for Character Behavior Design; Phil CarlisleAnalytics, Content Generation, and Experience ManagementAnalytics-Based AI Techniques for a Better Gaming Experience; Truong-Huy D. Nguyen, Zhengxing Chen, and Magy Seif El-NasrProcedural Content Generation: An Overview; Gillian SmithSimulation Principles from Dwarf Fortress; Tarn AdamsTechniques for AI-Driven Experience Management in Interactive Narratives; Vadim Bulitko, Greg Lee, Sergio Poo Hernandez, Alejandro Ramirez, and David ThueIndex

Steve Rabin has been a key figure in the game AI community for over a decade and is currently a principal software engineer at Nintendo of America. After initially working as an AI engineer at several Seattle start-ups, he managed and edited seven game AI books in the Game AI Pro series and the AI Game Programming Wisdom series. He also edited the book Introduction to Game Development and has over two dozen articles published in the Game Programming Gems series. He has been an invited keynote speaker at several AI conferences, founded the AI Game Programmers Guild in 2008, and founded the Game Developers Conference (GDC) AI Summit, where he has been a summit adviser since 2009. Steve is a principal lecturer at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, where he has taught game AI since 2006. He earned a BSc in computer engineering and an MS in computer science, both from the University of Washington.