Sunday, October 27, 2013

Game AI Pro: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals


A couple of brief snippets that provides an introduction to my chapter on developing a framework for building a behavioral model that can be be used for engineering virtual animals or really any in game agent.

A Control-Based Architecture for Animal Behavior

Many games include creatures or animals that exhibit the illusion of life while interacting with the game player and with the world around them. This illusion breaks when a creature does something that seems out of character or unnatural – and these types of breaks in the illusion are unfortunately all too common. Thus we need to provide the ability for our characters to exhibit believable behavior that is purposeful, while being robust enough to appear fully life-like.

... if our behavior is going to be believable then it needs to be more than just the output from a behavior tree or other AI architecture. It requires a system which can deliver the appropriate interactions regardless of the ever-changing situation in-game. If purposeful behavior is going to be believable then it must produce consistent results regardless of varying environmental conditions. This is something that real-world creatures typically handle without much thought, but for an AI character it can be quite hard.

... this chapter provides an introduction to aspects of controller theory that can be used to implement a behavioral system for life-like animals.

Sample Sources/Inspiration

[Hediger 1955], Heini Hediger, Studies of the Psychology and Behavior of Animals. New York: Criterion Books.
[James 1890 ], William James, The Principles of Psychology.,New York: Dover Publications.
[Lorenz 1981], Konrad Lorenz, “The Foundations of Ethology.” New York: Simon and Schuster.
[Powers 1989], William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception. New Canaan: Benchmark Publications.
[Ramsey 2009-A] Michael Ramsey, “A Unified Spatial Representation for Navigation Systems.” Proceedings of the Fifth AAAI Artificial Intelligence And Interactive Digital Conference, 2009,
pp.119-122.
[Ramsey 2009-B] Michael Ramsey, “A Practical Spatial Architecture for Animal and Agent Navigation.” Game Programming Gems 8, edited by Adam Lake. Boston:Charles River Media, 2010.
[Ramsey 2011] Michael Ramsey, “An Egocentric Motion Management System.” Game Engine Gems 2, edited by Eric Lengyel,
[Toda 1982] Masanao Toda, Man, Robot and Society:Models and Speculations. Martinus Nijhoff Publishing, 1982.

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