German AI firm Xaitment has entered into a partnership with character animation company Mixamo in a bid to jointly create ‘simpler and faster techniques for applying realistic AI and animations to game characters’.

We present a method for generating intelligent real-time behaviors for characters in competitive games. The characters compete to maximize their own accumulated reward in a zero-sum Markov game framework. Our method automatically generates near-optimal long-term strategies by constructing approximate value functions. We use a parametric motion graph to achieve responsive and highly dynamic character animation in real-time. The game-theoretic framework behaviors are both non-deterministic and near-optimal, enabling great variability and realism. Our framework also allows for creation of controllers that produce feints, misdirection moves, and other nuanced character motion that takes into the account the motion of the adversary.

I have got some pretty good progress on the areas. I have been concentrating on marking the areas. Volume based areas were pretty simple to do. So far I have only axis aligned box, but I do not expect the rest to be too complicated.

I have been working recently on the area generation improvements. One area I have been researching is how to generate and store the different areas. It looks like there is need for two kinds of areas, the ones that describe the basic structure of the level, such danger spots, and the ones that are modifiers to the previous ones, such as encoding movement type into the mesh.

The detail height mesh is finally here! I eventually managed to make it work with all the possible combinations of usage cases currently supported by the toolkit. That led me to think if I should drop one of the variations in future releases. If managing all of them gets too complicated, that might happen.

Navmesh Height Accuracy pt. 5 So fitting the detail mesh into the tiled preprocess was not as painless as I hoped. The problem is that the detail mesh requires the edges of the polygons to align perfectly as well as it requires the heightfield present to pull the date from.

Some folks have been wondering what is the meaning behind some of the Recast generation settings. Here’s a quick primer how to derive the correct values.

GDC Europe 09: World’s largest independent browser-MMO group to empower NPCs with Xaitment’s AI tech.

German MMO group Gameforge has purchased a license to use tech from AI solutions group Xaitment.

I made some good progress over the weekend. I rewrote the code a couple of times and now it starts to be acceptable. I changed my crappy vertex insertion code to actual Delaunay triangulation code and the meshes looks far better now, and the speed is about the same.

New version adds 3D geometry projection to ground shapes; Monolith new licensee.

French firm PathEngine has updated its eponymous pathfinding solution to v5.21.00.