by Alex J. Champandard

New Riders, October, 2003.
Trade Paperback, 721 pages.
ISBN: 1592730043

AI Game Development provides a comprehensive look at artificial intelligence inside computer games. This includes the non-player characters, monsters and other synthetic beings that make the games seem more realistic. The book also offers insight, suggestions and techniques about developing autonomous synthetic creatures for games. Author Alex Champandard was a lead programmer of FEAR, an open source AI game project, and the founder of AI Depot, an online AI community. Champandard focuses on a design concept called nouvelle game AI which combines elements of reaction architectures and learning algorithms. The concept helps designers develop independent AI agents that can act and react to a gaming environment in their own way and learn to adapt to new environments. Champandard expands on nouvelle game AI in the book while also covering AI game concepts like obstacle avoidance, combat settings, shooting, perceptrons, weapon selection, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, emotions and adaptive behaviors.

A companion website for the book includes source code, demos, exercises and tutorials. This is great book for those new to AI game development or for serious game developers looking to learn modern gaming skills or techniques. Some experience with C++ and a C++ compiler is needed for those who want to use the source code and demos.

AI Game Development is available for purchase on Amazon.com

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This review was published in the March-April, 2004 of The Internet Writing Journal.

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