Artificial Intelligence for Games by Ian Millington

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Synopsis

Creating robust artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges for game developers. The commercial success of a game is often dependent upon the quality of the AI, yet the engineering of AI is often begun late in the development process and is frequently misunderstood.

In this book, Ian Millington brings extensive professional experience to the problem of improving the quality of AI in games. A game developer since 1987, he was founder of Mindlathe Ltd., at the time the largest specialist AI company in gaming. Ian shows how to think about AI as an integral part of game play.

He describes numerous examples from real games and explores the underlying ideas through detailed case studies. He goes further to introduce many techniques little used by developers today. The book's CD-ROM contains a library of C++ source code and demonstration programs, and provides access to a website with a complete commercial source code library of AI algorithms and techniques.

* A comprehensive, professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games.
* Walks through the entire development process from beginning to end.
* Includes over 100 pseudo code examples of techniques used in commercial games, case studies for all major genres, a CD-ROM and companion website with extensive C++ source code implementations for Windows, and source code libraries for Linux and OS X available through the website.

Annotation

Creating robust artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges for game developers. AI is increasingly important to games, and a game's commercial success is often dependent on the quality of the AI. However, AI is still not well understood by many developers, and it is often tacked on late in the development process. There remains tremendous room to improve the quality of AI in games. In his new book, Ian Millington brings extensive professional experience to this problem. A game developer since 1987, he was founder of Mindlathe Ltd., at the time the largest specialist AI company in gaming. Ian shows how to think about AI concepts from the start as an integral part of the game play, describes numerous examples from real games, and explores these ideas in-depth through detailed case studies. Plentiful C++ source code examples are included on the CD-ROM to illustrate implementation. He goes further to introduce many techniques currently unknown to developers, and discusses types of AI specific to different genres of games, such as driving or sports games. A comprehensive, professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games written by an engineer with extensive industrial experience.

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Biography

Ian Millington is a partner of IPR Ventures, a consulting company developing next-generation AI technologies for entertainment, modeling, and simulation. Previously he founded Mindlathe Ltd, the largest specialist AI middleware company in computer games, working with on a huge range of game genres and technologies. He has a long background in AI, including PhD research in complexity theory and natural computing. He has published academic and professional papers and articles on topics ranging from paleontology to hypertext.