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What's Next? As always at the AI roundtables, I asked my fellow developers for their opinion on a number of questions regarding the future of the industry. Where did developers think game AI was going in the next year or so? Will AI continue to be an important part of game design, or will multiplayers render good game AIs moot? Where did developers feel the next big advance in game AI would come from? Opinions on these questions were mixed, as one might expect. Any AI developer worth his salt, after all, is pretty darn sure that his or her next game will be the one to contribute something of particular value to the field. Most continued to feel that there would be a slow move away from rigid, rules-based AIs towards more flexible, fuzzy AIs that made use of a variety of technologies in combination with one another. Additionally, as noted above, most developers seemed to think that there would continue to be a move towards opening up the AI to ever-greater levels of user interaction, mostly through a scripting interface of some kind. Everybody was hoping that somebody would manage to put out a game that actually provided programming-level hooks into the AI engine, though nobody at the roundtables volunteered. Nearly every developer present felt strongly that good game AI would only increase in importance as a part of the finished product, whether multiplayer options were present or not. The reasons for this belief were much the same as they were last year — good game AI will become more of a discriminator as 3D technology levels out, and advances in that area become less spectacular. Learning AIs that can adapt to a given player's style are considered to have big potential, and many developers are concentrating their efforts in that area. When it came to where developers felt the next big advance in game AI would come from, opinions varied widely across all genres. This was echoed by a poll recently posted on my game AI page, the results of which are shown in Figure 2.
There is no question that the game AI field continues to be one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of game development. CPU and memory constraints are (slowly) being lifted, freeing developers to experiment with much more interesting and aggressive AI techniques. We're figuring out what works and what doesn't, slowly building suites of tools to speed things along, and just generally getting better at the job. Better and more entertaining games will be the inevitable result.
Steve's background in AI comes from over a decade of SDI-related work building massive real-time distributed war games for the Air Force at the Joint National Test Facility. When he's not saving the world, he does AI development on a contract basis and goes target shooting when he gets the chance. Steve lives in Colorado Springs, Colo., with a very understanding wife and an indeterminate number of ferrets. He maintains a web page on game AI at http://www.gameai.com, and can be reached via e-mail at ferretman@gameai.com. |
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