Paris Game AI

I stumbled across the Paris Game AI conference, there was some interesting stuff.

The most interesting was Mikko's open source automatic navmesh generator. The demo makes the technology look useable enough.

If your not convinced by the navmesh approach yet, the AI blog has an excellent discussion of thebenefits of a navmesh over waypoints. Including some amusing failed videogame pathfinding algorithms.

The most interesting presentations were Coordinating Agents with Behavior Trees for Farcry from Crytech. It's a different approach to behavior management than the standard emergent behavior approach using a blackboard. I'm not convinced its really novel, all they have done is named the approach taken by your standard undergrad robotics students, but they make a good argument for it. The big advantage is that you have far more control over how the behaviors are activated, which is something you really need in games if you have a demanding director.

Another great presentation is Killzone 2 Multiplayer Bots. Not because there is anything amazingly new in it, but just because they cover their entire process, squads, 'strategic reasoning' by annotating special AI nodes with certain behavior, the waypoint network, and influence maps.

While I am on the topic of game AI, the botprize will be having it's first round playoffs at ECU in Perth next week, should be fun!