Now that I'm rolling off of The Suffering: Ties That Bind and have my AIGPW3 article out the door, I figure it's time to make an intro post with obligatory bio:
Before getting into the game industry, I got my MS in CS at the University of Utah, where I once had the pleasure of flipping through Gouraud's and Phong's original dissertations in the library. I was then involved in a financially unsuccessful start-up that resulted in a nonetheless fun shareware game, StixWorld. That led me to Surreal Software where I've been for almost as many years as Duke Nukem Forever has been in development, developing AI for Drakan:OOTF, Drakan:TAG, LOTR:FOTR, The Suffering, and The Suffering: TTB. I presented a paper (slides) on the AI architecture used in FOTR and both Suffering games at the Challenges in Game AI workshop last year.
Now that I have time to start looking towards AI for next-gen consoles, I'm thinking that one of the biggest impacts will be the ability to have so many more characters on screen. On the PS2 and XBox, rendering and animation were enough of a bottleneck that we were limited to a small number of NPCs. But increasing the numbers of NPCs is more than just a quantitative change. As crowd density increases, navigation becomes a fundamentally different problem and any N^2 algorithms we've been using will fall apart. These changes will have effects rippling up into the AI decision making--it will be much less reasonable for an NPC to pick an "unoccupied" position, find a path, and then use simple steering behaviors to get to that exact spot, ignoring any possible crowd movements that might happen in the mean time.
That will keep us busy adapting for next-gen consoles and maybe another generation or two after that, but according to the crowd panic researchers, we're shooting for the fixed target maximum density of 10 people per m^2. Ouch.
I wonder how many scripters Carmack will have to hire then?