by Alex J. Champandard
New Riders, October, 2003.
Trade Paperback, 721 pages.
ISBN: 1592730043
AI Game Development provides a comprehensive look
at artificial intelligence inside computer games. This includes
the non-player characters, monsters and other synthetic
beings that make the games seem more realistic.
The book also offers insight, suggestions and techniques
about developing autonomous synthetic creatures for
games. Author Alex Champandard was a lead programmer
of FEAR, an open source AI game project, and
the founder of AI Depot, an online AI community.
Champandard focuses on a design concept called
nouvelle game AI which combines elements of
reaction architectures and learning algorithms. The
concept helps designers develop independent AI
agents that can act and react to a gaming environment
in their own way and learn to adapt to new environments.
Champandard expands on nouvelle game AI in the book
while also covering AI game concepts like obstacle
avoidance, combat settings, shooting, perceptrons, weapon
selection, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, emotions and
adaptive behaviors.
A companion website for the book includes source code,
demos, exercises and tutorials.
This is great book for those new to AI game development
or for serious game developers looking to learn
modern gaming skills or techniques. Some experience
with C++ and a C++ compiler is needed for those who
want to use the source code and demos.
AI Game Development is available for purchase on
Amazon.com
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This review was published in the March-April, 2004 of The Internet Writing Journal.
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