Welcome to the ORTS competition page. The third RTS game AI competition will be held August 1-8, 2008. On this page you can find descriptions of the game categories, the tournament rules, and a brief ORTS overview. We encourage students, AI researchers, and hobbyists interested in real-time strategy games to get familiar with the ORTS project and to participate in this year’s competition. Everybody is welcome. Game 1,2,3 are identical (except for hp changes), but we added 20 siege tanks to game 4, to encourage working on tactical AI for heterogenous forces. Also, programs are now allowed to save data in directory ~/game-data, which can be used to implement opponent modeling algorithms.

For AIFighter, the AIs must learn from the player’s actions how to fight. There are two types of primitives, actions and conditions. Actions are available moves character (AI or human alike) can perform, like Swing Sword or Move Towards Opponent. Conditionals are statements about the world (like Opponent just targeted me with Bow) that might inform an AI unit which action to take. During the training phase, the AI builds a table which has each action that the player took and the existing conditionals at the time of that action.

Sometimes, it’s nice to get news straight from the horse’s mouth. In a recent interview, StarCraft 2 lead producer Chris Sigaty talked about the recent developments that Blizzard has made with the game, specifically the game’s AI and the Zerg Swarm in StarCraft 2.

Artificial intelligence conference to take place in October at Stanford University

Organisers of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment conference (AIIDE) have revealed the dates for this year’s foray into game AI.

I’ve written about AI in video games and their real-life impact a while ago, with the conclusion that it is quite basic and does not really contain “intelligence”. Now with all the hype around the newest version of the Grand Theft Auto series, GTA IV, and a development budget of about $100 million, lets take a closer look if anything has changed.

Dave Mark raises some interesting questions about artificial intelligence in games over at AIGameDev.com. First, he explains that although we’re seeing more and better AI in games, a common complaint heard from gamers runs along the lines of “why can’t they combine such and such AI feature from game X in game Y.” Then, Dave poses the questions for developers to answer

The making of LEAF Part 2 - Fulfilling the needs

This week, I’m going to cover the starting point for fulfilling the needs we identified in part 1. Specifically, we’re going to look at the Behavior Tree structure that will form the starting point for developing the AI interactions.