I feel like this feature really adds to the quality of the gameplay. The A.I. now fights with towers, not just troops! The A.I. can try to push you back using mostly towers, like human players do. Also, I’ve noticed that pitched battles develop much more frequently now. I LOVE pitched battles, with the sieging of some strategic map location, that requires one side to come up with a breakthrough, in either technology or tactics.

I just got back from a hands on with Killzone 2 multiplayer, which I will tell you about in a bit, where Guerrilla Games multiplayer designer Eric Boltjes confirmed that Killzone 2 would indeed be featuring AI bots to help fill out online matches while allowing those who prefer the offline multiplayer experience someone fake to play with. Bots in Killzone 2 will actively try to react how a player would react, able to use all abilities, weapons, and participate in all mission types.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently pondering the creation of my own AI characters for use in my game/fiction/universe project. The idea of mashing up the four topics above are purely theoretical.

xaitment GmbH, one of the leading developers and service providers of artificial intelligence for the games and simulation industries, and Coreplay, a development studio located in Munich, Germany, announced today that they have begun work together on a first person action game entitled “Swarm - First Contact” for the PC and Xbox 360. In the game, players take on the roll of humans as they battle an attacking alien force that is bent on overrunning the earth and all of mankind. A demo of the game can be seen at this year’s Games Convention in Leipzig at xaitment’s booth, G20. The booth can be found in the Developer Village in Hall 2.

Rockstar, the creators of such hits as Grand Theft Auto IV and Bully, has acquired a new studio; Rockstar New England (formerly Mad Doc® Software). With experience in every aspect of game development, and an unmatched expertise in Artificial Intelligence, Rockstar New England is a registered Xbox®, Xbox 360™ and PlayStation®3 developer. Having recently completed the Xbox 360 adaption of Bully: The Scholarship Edition, the studio is working on exciting new projects, and looking for people who want to be part of one of the most successful and innovative developers of interactive entertainment.

Surreal Software Inc. (a subsidiary of Midway and the studio which created The Suffering and Drakan) has an opening for a Senior Artificial Intelligence programmer to help develop the AI source base of projects including “This is Vegas,” our new AAA-budget open-world title for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

Midway Chicago has an opportunity for a smart, innovative Senior AI programmer who wishes to push the boundaries for a triple-A multi-platform game. We are looking for a senior software engineer who has top-to-bottom experience with AI game code, systems, and tools; someone who understands that good game AI is about far more than path finding and algorithms – it is about bringing the world to life, making it believable, engaging the player and above all else, making it fun to play.

Iterations (or Sprints) are like mini projects by themselves. They often include design, coding, asset creation, tuning and debugging. However we are not always producing full vertical slices of a game every iteration. We’ll use a an example of what we might deliver for a team which is focused on creating AI behaviors: One of the most difficult aspects of AI behavior is navigation in a complex environment. The AI logic has to identify objects that will prevent the NPC from moving and calculate a path around them. Throw in some other moving characters and objects and the problem can become very complex to solve. Navigation can become the most riskiest problem to solve AI and therefore one the the riskiest problems to solve for the entire game.

You might have noticed I’ve been using this blog as my answer file. Every post answers a complicated question that’s too important to leave unanswered but too complicated to explain in casual conversation.

One question I run into is: “Don’t you think we’re moving toward special-purpose AI hardware, in the same way that the ATI and nVidia GPUs accelerate 3D graphics?”

This post explains why that will never happen, and why we should be happy that it won’t.