ai
Competitions
WIN! King Of Fighters XII PS3/360 Collectors Editions
10:00AM David Wildgoose | Let’s take a look at some of the Kotaku readers vying to win one of eight figurine-tastic collectors editions of SNK’s King Of Fighters XII. More »
Culture
Robot Learns How To Play Pitfall
6:30PM Luke Plunkett
We. Are. Doomed. While Japanese robots divert our attention with cute faces and coffee-making, the real work is being done at places like Rutgers University, where a robot has learned how to play Pitfall. More »
News
First Physics, Now AI Is Being Moved To Your Graphics Card
2:30PM Luke Plunkett | Once was a time a graphics card handled just that. Graphics. But these days? Nvidia cards already handle physics processing, and by next year both Nvidia and ATI cards might handling AI as well. More »
Uncharted 2 Enemies A Little Smarter, A Little More Agile
5:30PM Luke Plunkett | Uncharted 2 is a sequel, so things are being tweaked, things are being added, things are being improved. One area Naughty Dog are working on is enemy AI, particularly how it reacts to Nathan’s presence. More »
Valve Wants To Look At Your Brains
7:20AM Stuart Houghton | Let’s clear this up – the creatures in Left 4 Dead are NOT after your brains. They aren’t zombies, they are the infected. Valve Software though? They totally want to have a root around inside your grey cells. More »
News
EKI One Middleware To Bring Mixed Emotions
7:30AM Kotaku US Edition | Emotional attachment is a rare quality in video games. It takes a particular combination of good writing and good design to draw you in to a character’s world and stop you seeing an avatar as just another bunch of pixels. AI startup Artificial Technology reckons it has a way to inject a little life into the dead-eyed puppets that populate most games. EKI One is AI middleware that Artificial Technology claim can give characters ‘Intelligent and emotional behaviour’ to enhance the game experience. Quite how this is achieved is unclear (and probably NDA’d to the hilt) but the company say that gamers will “experience the story together with the characters and share the emotions of joy, anger, desire, rage and sorrow”. Sounds great, no? If you want to see the tech in action, you shouldn’t have long to wait. German developer Twintime has licenced EKI One for its upcoming mystery game Odessa Twins. Artificial Technology unveils EKI One [Develop] More »
The Problems With Pathfinding
3:30AM Maggie Greene | Paul Tozour has put up an entertaining video over at the Game/AI blog on the problem of pathfinding – which could probably otherwise be known as ‘Wait a minute, that enemy has wings but is getting hung up on a ledge it’s flying above. What?’. Along with the video, he’s also written a somewhat lengthy treatise on pathfinding in games using waypoints, which he argues are obsolete — and offers some potential solutions. But what about those who say, ‘Well, it worked just fine for us in our last game.’ Tozour has this to say: More »
News
On Academic and Industry Collaboration
7:00AM Maggie Greene | It frequently seems, when looking at the academic research side of things and the ‘real world’ applications, that never the twain shall meet – academics are notorious for floating about in their own little world (it’s practically part of the job description some days …), while everyone else wants to know how academic research can be applied to real world situations. There’s an interesting post up on Game/AI – especially the comments – talking about the problems of bridging the industry/academic gap in gaming. Are we all too beholden to our institutional obligations? Is there any way to bridge the gap? Will academics ever get their heads out of the theoretical clouds? Will designers ever start thinking academics have something to offer beside star gazing? More »
Constructing Artificial Emotions: Game Design
8:30AM Maggie Greene | I love the essays put together by Daniel Cook (aka Danc) of Lost Garden – they’re frequently complex, but always enlightening. This week at Gamasutra, he tackled the challenge of creating strong emotional experiences via game design: it’s a powerful aspect of media and one that has been discussed in a lot of forums. He pins down the (general) problem of game design when it comes to evoking emotion – designers tend to rely on one of two methods. Either games fall back on other forms of media (”And then we show a movie of the faithful heroine being stabbed by the evil villain!”) or what he terms ‘copious handwaving’ (’”See, this pink pulsating blob represents ‘Feelings’”, explains the designer to the confused player.’). His solutions? Taking a look at several different methods (most with a long history of other applications), their uses and limitations, and how technology can help. Some general thoughts?: Here is a thought. When trying to create emotion in your players, tone down with the fixation on Hollywood, camera techniques and in-game narrative. It isn’t our unique strength as a medium. Instead, explore what would happen if we, as designers, actively attempted to create and manipulate the social, psychological and physical environments of our players in order to induce artificial emotions. Toss the storyboards and scripts. Game design becomes an exercise not so dissimilar from the movie The Truman Show. You provide the carefully balanced system that sets up the appropriate physiological states and cognitive labels. The players react with predictable, measurable human drama. OK, I’m not sure we really need to toss the storyboards in all cases, but experimentation with new ways of making the medium more powerful is never a bad thing. It’s a really, really interesting piece and well worth sitting down to peruse. Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment [Gamasutra] More »
