Introduction

The event was held in one of the rooms of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers on the 9th and 10th of June. About 15 speakers and panel contributors participated and informed the ~170 listeners per talk about their research and their approach to different AI problems, and talked about themes such as emotions and body language.

State of the industry

There have been made many interesting statements during this first session that it’s worth an article of its own. But I’ll pick some of the short statements that interested me most:

Phil Carlisle mentioned that independent game developers tend to do more experimentation than main-stream developers.

Mieszko Zielinski stated that designers want total control but when the player does something the designers had not foreseen the AI looks broken.

Alex J. Champandard said that one of the achievements of the last 10 years is that the technology is now in place and the programmer is not in charge of everything anymore. Designers can actually start focusing on the design without having to interact with programmers for every single requirement.

Table of Contents

• Emotion in Game Characters (Phil Carlisle)
  Phil will present an overview of the field and a review of recent research for developers who are curious about emotional reactions for game characters. He’ll also discuss this from a practical perspective, outlining the techniques that are ready to be applied and how.
• Coordinating Agents with Behavior Trees (Ricard Pillosu)
  Recently, the concept of Behaviour Trees has been gaining traction and was used games like Spore or Halo 3. Crytek has adopted and developed this technology to also coordinate different agents in complex situations. After a brief introduction to Crytek´s perspective on Behaviour Trees, Ricardo will provide examples on how this concept can be used to simulate group tactics.

• Discussion on Squads & Group Behaviors (Mieszko Zielinski, Mikko Mononen, Ricard Pillosu)
  This Q&A session follows Ricardo's talk; it features a panel discussion with Mieszko and Mikko, talking about squad behaviors in general. What are the biggest challenges and key points that we need to address going forwards? How can we improve the behaviors and make them easier to author?
• The AI of Killzone 2's Multiplayer Bots (Remco Straatman)
  This talk will discuss the implementation of bots in Killzone 2’s online and offline multi-player component. We will discuss the overall hierarchical AI framework, the way individual bot behaviors such as badge usage are implemented using our HTN planner, how individual behaviors mix with the overall objectives in multiplayer modes and how we use data acquired at run-time to influence the tactical decisions.

• AI Multithreading & Parallelization (Bjoern Knafla)
  Bjoern will provide an overview of the concepts and techniques that are the most commonly used for parallelizing code in the games industry, and present some of his own results applying multi-threading to a large crowd simulation.
• The Art of Concurrency and AI System Architecture (Julien Hamaide, Björn Knafla, Markus Mohr)
  Bjoern's presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with Julien and Markus that looks into some of the more practical aspects of game AI multithreading. Desining and architecture for concurrency can be a bit of an art, so be prepared for more subjective and possibly controversial opinions!
• Advice and Tales from the Trenches (Mieszko Zielinski, Alex J. Champandard)
  In this interactive discussion panel, these veteran game developers will tell the story about how they got started, share some of their experiences from working in industry, and give advice to developers who are looking to get into the industry as AI Programmers.

• Planning Multi-unit Maneuvers using HTN and A* (William van der Sterren)
  William's presentation will discuss the application of HTN and A* to help plan and coordinate groups of units. In the context of a turn-based strategy game, he’ll show how a planner can be used offline to create stimulating new scenarios for current games without the need for manual scripting.
• Approaches to Interactive Narrative Generation and Story Telling (Daniel Kudenko)
  Daniel will be providing an overview over approaches to Interactive Drama, highlighting and summarizing the state of academic research on the subject, present an overview of selected systems, and point to potential avenues in industry collaboration to help you figure out where to start looking.

• The Racing AI in Pure (Eduardo Jimenez)
  Eduardo will explain how the AI for riders is designed to prevent the feeling of rubber band AI that’s symptomatic of many racing games, and will present the solution to the problem applied in Pure which falls into the increasingly popular category of “experience management” for games.
• AI Characters From Animation to Behavior (Christiaan Moleman, Julien Hamaide, Phil Carlisle)
  This panel brings together an artist/animators, and animation programmers/designers to discuss the challenges of next-gen animation. How can we improve our current animation workflows to get around the usual motion capture problems? How can we improve the quality of characters without having gigabytes of motion capture?
• Voxelization of Polygon Soups for Navigation (Mikko Mononen)
  Mikko will talk about an open source R&D project of his called Recast. The project is based on the idea of converting polygon soups into navigation meshes that can be used for pathfinding in space. He’ll present his approach step by step and discuss the benefits of this approach compared to other techniques.

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