I missed this one in August, but just stumbled across this Bungie podcast interviewing Peruvian A.I. wiz Damian Isla about Halo 2&3 A.I. It's a good listen.
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=12705
The Halo series gets a lot of attention for it's multiplayer, but this podcast highlights the huge challenges faced in developing the single player campaign -- lots of characters on-screen at once strategically using a variety of equipment and vehicles, and even running around on moving platforms. No small feat.
Congrats to both Paul and Damian for recently shipping blockbuster titles garnering well deserved critical praise (Metroid and Halo respectively). Hopefully we will hear some juicy tidbits about their AI technologies here soon (especially from Damian who created this blog!)
As the deadline for IGF2008 passes, I have to confess that the next installment of The Restaurant Game will not be "shipping" quite yet. I still have work to do to automate conversational characters from the captured gameplay data, and would like to collect even more data in the mean time. I'm aiming for IGF2009, but I'll only promise to get it out before DNF. I've documented my progress so far at analyzing the data in the form of a Masters Thesis.
To date over 7,500 unique players have completed 6,762 games (including NPR Science Friday's Ira Flatow). Data is still trickling in, and we're inching our way to 10,000 games. Thank you to those who have played. Apologies for the delay -- I just don't want to serve anything that's undercooked. I owe you all a free dessert.
-Jeff