Archive for December, 2007

DBP 2.0 Challenge Announced

From the DBP Site:

artificial intelligence noun: the capability of a machine to
perform functions that are normally associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning and optimization through experience
[Abbreviation : AI]

Push the limits of Artificial Intelligence while building a game with XNA
Game Studio 2.0. Create a new and innovative use of Artificial
Intelligence in a game and you could win the opportunity to
interview for at an internship with Microsoft Research, Rare Ltd
or Lionhead Studios. Review the Official Rules for more details.

Just as a thought exercise, I went to the Wikipedia entry for Game AI.  I made a (very) rough list of AI concepts in the order in which that wiki entry introduces them in.

  • enemy movement based on stored patterns.
  • enemy movement based on hash of human input for more randomization
  • different personalities for enemies (chase, evade, random, cut off @ pass)
  • Tunable AI for user controllable experience
  • Pathfinding
  • FSM for many actors
  • Neural Network
  • Evaluation of player action
  • Environmental awareness (cover, getting dead mate’s weapons)
  • AI Team cooperation
  • Information Suppression (no cheating)

It seems to me that either you’re going to be “pushing the limits of AI”, or you’ll be “creating a new and innovating use of AI”.  Unfortunately, I know that I won’t have time to participate in this contest. However, I urge all you would-be participants to look at the list above and ask yourself if you’re going to try to come up with a new technique altogether, or simply a creative composition of the above to come up with something new and fresh.

Good Luck!

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DBP 2.0 is around the corner

The last one resulted in a huge number of pretty awesome games.  I noticed that as a result of that contest, the topics on the XNA forums became very deep and technical.  And the games that resulted were pretty awesome:
http://www.dreambuildplay.com

Can’t wait to see what comes out of this one :-)

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Next build of Scurvy.Media almost done

I fleshed out the content writer and reader in my latest checkin to codeplex.  I’m almost done, there’s just a little bit of work left to do on the reader, then time for testing, and a bit of re-organization of namespaces and types.  I anticipate having it ready in another coding session or two.

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