What does an AI system do?

Started by
3 comments, last by cardinal 10 years, 5 months ago

I was looking at one of the LinkedIn profile of a senior game programmer.

On his profile he wrote:

Worked on unreleased third-person action game

Developed AI systems for enemies.

What exactly does an AI system do? I probably should also ask what a system in a game do? Mostly doing management perhaps?

I wrote a basic AI movement of a monster in my basic arcade shooter game earlier this year, mostly using some hacky code to force it to work. So I am not sure how a system would actually work in a game. How much work in an AI system does managing or keeping track of all the AI in the game?

Are all systems in a game just simple components working together? Like how a car would probably work?

Advertisement
"System" is a pretty empty word, which can mean almost anything. An "AI system for enemies" is the part of a game that decides what the bad guys do. You might feel that calling this "AI" is a bit bombastic, but it is the standard name for it in the game-development community, and it's precisely what the "Artificial Intelligence" forum in this site is about.

There is no truly real AI in games (with some few exceptions/experiments in there), mostly because AI is unpredictable, and you don't want that as a game designer. Usually Enemy AI system is a combination of stuff like:

  • how enemies "know/detect" what the player is doing
  • how enemies react to this input (the logic behind it)
A definition I like about "AI" in games is "A system where the PC knows at the right time when to stop pretending it doesn't know what the player is doing"
How you achieve this goal, is up to you (Behavior trees, State machines, Neural Networks, Markov Chains, simple random choice of actions, N-Grams, etc).

AI Systems is a vague term. If I were to interview this person for a job, I would assume it meant he designed the framework in which the game's AI works as well as some of the specific AI features within this framework, and I would ask him to elaborate on it.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement