Artificial Intelligence for Games, Second Edition

Creating robust artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges for game developers, yet the commercial success of a game is often dependent upon the quality of the AI. In this book, Ian Millington brings extensive professional experience to the problem of improving the quality of AI in games. 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.

Artificial Intelligence for Games - 2nd edition will be highly useful to academics teaching courses on game AI, in that it includes exercises with each chapter. It will also include new and expanded coverage of the following: AI-oriented gameplay; Behavior driven AI; Casual games (puzzle games).

• The first comprehensive, professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games written by an engineer with extensive industry experience.
• Walks through the entire development process from beginning to end.
• Includes examples from over 100 real games, and 10 in-depth case studies

About the Authors

Ian Millington is a partner of Icosagon Ltd. (icosagon.com), 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 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.

John Funge (jfunge.com) recently joined Netflix to start and lead the new Game Platforms group. Previously, John co-founded AiLive and spent nearly ten years helping to create a successful company that is now well known for its pioneering machine learning technology for games. AiLive co-created the Wii MotionPlus hardware and has established its LiveMove products as the industry standard for automatic motion recognition. At AiLive John also worked extensively on LiveAI, a real-time behavior capture product that is being used by the former lead game designer of Guitar Hero and Rock Band to create a new genre of game. John is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) where he teaches a Game AI course that he proposed, designed and developed. John has a PhD from the University of Toronto and an MSc from the University of Oxford. He holds several patents, is the author of numerous technical papers, and wrote two previous books on Game AI.