Read more
Creating robust artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges for game developers. The commercial success of a game is often dependent upon the quality of the AI, yet the engineering of AI is often begun late in the development process and is frequently misunderstood. In this book, Ian Millington brings extensive professional experience to the problem of improving the quality of AI in games. A game developer since 1987, he was founder of Mindlathe Ltd., at the time the largest specialist AI company in gaming. Ian shows how to think about AI as an integral part of game play. He describes numerous examples from real games and explores the underlying ideas through detailed case studies. He goes further to introduce many techniques little used by developers today. The book's CD-ROM contains a library of C++ source code and demonstration programs, and provides access to a website with a complete commercial source code library of AI algorithms and techniques. * A comprehensive, professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games. * Walks through the entire development process from beginning to end. * Includes over 100 pseudo code examples of techniques used in commercial games, case studies for all major genres, a CD-ROM and companion website with extensive C++ source code implementations for Windows, and source code libraries for Linux and OS X available through the website.
List of contents
PREFACE; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; About the CD-ROM; PART I AI AND GAMES ; 1 INTRODUCTION; 2 GAME AI; PART II TECHNIQUES ; 3 MOVEMENT; 4 PATHFINDING; 5 DECISION MAKING; 6 TACTICAL AND STRATEGIC AI; 7 LEARNING; 8 BOARD GAMES; PART III SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES ; 9 EXECUTION MANAGEMENT; 10 WORLD INTERFACING; 11 TOOLS AND CONTENT CREATION; 12 DESIGNING GAME AI; 13 AI-BASED GAME GENRES; APPENDIX; A REFERENCES; A.1 BOOKS, PERIODICALS, AND PAPERS; A.2 GAMES; INDEX
Report
"Ian Millington crosses the boundary between academic and professional game AI with his bookArtificial Intelligence for Games. Most books either lack academic rigor or are rigorous with algorithms that won't work under the CPU constraints imposed by modern games. This book walks a line between the two and does it well. It explains algorithms rigorously while also discussing appropriate implementation details such as scheduling AI over time and using the right data structures. I will be using this book for my Game AI course." -Jessica D. Bayliss, Ph.D., Rochester Institute of Technology
"This is the first serious attempt to create a comprehensive reference for all game AI practices, terminology, and know-how. Works like this are badly needed by the maturing video games industry. Systematic yet accessible, it is a must-have for any student or professional." -Marcin Chady, Ph.D., Radical Entertainment
"This book promises to be the closest I've seen to what is needed in the field. I would highly recommend it for people in the industry." -John Laird, University of Michigan
"Ian Millington's book is a comprehensive reference to the most widely used techniques in game AI today. Any game developer working on AI will learn something from this book, and game producers should make sure their AI programmers have a copy." -Dr. Ian Lane Davis, Mad Doc Software
