Very exciting stuff! I'm seriously tempted to sign up.

Here are links to the webpage, flyer, and announcement video on YouTube.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The ICAPS 2010 Workshop on Planning in Games
Toronto, Canada
May 12 or 13, 2010

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/icaps2010-pg

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CALL FOR PAPERS
Agents for Games and Simulations
Workshop@AAMAS 2010
May 10-11, 2010, Toronto, Canada
http://people.cs.uu.nl/dignum/AGS10/
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The debate is between those who favor hand-generated content (which I’ll dub the “artists” for the purpose of this post) and those who prefer computer-generated or procedurally-generated content (which I’ll dub the “proceduralists”).

In the animation world, the proceduralists (who are generally engineers) will argue that modern games have characters who are expected to be as reactive as possible to the world around them, while at the same time those worlds become more and more complex. On top of that, we want our characters to have as much variety as possible in their actions, so that they feel “real.” For instance, we don’t want a bartender just to stand there. He should polish the bar, clean glasses, and clean up after departed patrons. He should serve drinks. He should gossip with his patrons. He should laugh when he overhears a joke. He should pinch the waitress’s butt. And so forth. The end result is a combinatorial explosion in the number of actual motions that need to be made by our characters. As a result, we’re reaching the limits of what can be done with keyframed animation (where each motion needs to be created in advance, whether by an animator or through motion capture, and then shipped with the game). Even something as simple as pointing at somebody is impossible to do with purely keyframed animation, unless the exact position of the target is known in advance.

What’s more, because we’re limited in the amount of hand-generated animation we can ship, keyframed solutions tend to look mechanical and repetitive, as a limited set of animations are played over and over. Coming back to our bartender example, it’s doubtful that we can ship all of those different behaviors that I mentioned, along with enough variations on each behavior that they aren’t repetitive, if each version needs to be completely pre-generated.

On the flip side of the debate, the artists will make very similar-sounding arguments to support the opposite point of view. Given the level photorealism expected of a modern game, they’ll say, we can’t afford to rely on the computer to create our animations for us. Procedurally generated animations such as ragdoll and IK tend to look mechanical and artificial exactly because they are created in a mechanical and artificial way. If our games are going to look and feel “real” then we need the sense of character and visual fidelity that can only be obtained either through hand-generated animation or, better still, motion-captured animation which is then touched up by an animator. What we need is *more* keyframed animation, along with simple techniques (such as blending) that can allow us to combine them without losing quality.

This debate is far from over. New research is presented at conferences like SIGGRAPH every year that suggests ways to animate. With that said, it seems like in the end the truth will lie somewhere in the middle. Currently, the most forward-looking animation technologies that are actually shipping in games seem to be Spore and Euphoria. Spore, as most people know, is a game in which the player has extensive control over the appearance of his creatures, up to and including controlling the number and position of appendages, and the game has to animate whatever it gets. Euphoria is an animation technology from Natural Motion, which has been used in games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Grand Theft Auto IV. It enables characters to interact in realistic and dynamic ways with the physical world. The interesting thing is that, as best I can discern, both of these products rely heavily on a mixing keyframed animation with procedural techniques.

Lately, I’ve been coming across a similar debate in the AI community. Ironically, most software engineers working in the games industry are actually the artists in this debate, while the proceduralists are largely academics. The arguments are more or less identical. The proceduralists argue that given the incredible complexity of modern games, as well as the desire for characters who are highly dynamic and reactive, it is unrealistic to think that we can rely on techniques like Behavior Trees, utility-based AI, or hand-crafted planners to create the breadth and depth of AI that we want to see in our games. Instead, we should be looking into solutions that use machine learning, or player modeling, or more general planners, or robust reasoners with strong psychological models and large ontologies, or any of a host of other techniques to generate as much of our behavior as possible.

The artists will argue that after roughly half a century of AI research, none of those techniques has been shown to be able to create the quality of behavior that we want to see in our games. They’ll say that we’re not trying to solve any hard AI problems here – we’re just trying to create characters who look and act in believable ways, and to avoid artificial stupidity, and we can do that if we just put enough care and attention to detail into our hand-crafted solution. And in saying that they’ll ignore the fact that we haven’t yet managed to achieve that either – or at least haven’t managed to achieve it very often – despite the ever-increasing size of AI teams and CPU resources available.

So I don’t have any good answers in either debate, except to say that both animation and AI in a dynamic, photorealistic environment with a large enough behavior set to generate believable characters are really hard. But I do wonder… is the solution in terms of AI going to look something like Euphoria or Spore? That is, rather than sitting in our well-defended camps and throwing stones at one another, should we be looking for techniques that blend hand-crafted AI with some sort of procedural techniques? And what would such a solution even look like?

EDIT: Alex Champandard has agreed to host an extended version of this on AiGameDev.com. This will probably happen sometime in November. I will post a link here when it's made available.

A few close collaborators and I have been toiling away under the radar for a couple months now, and I'm now really happy to be able to tell everyone a little bit about what we're working on.

The short answer is, a new studio!

Me and my ex-Bungie colleagues Michel Bastien and Rob Stokes are now officially Moonshot Games.

The three of us have been incredibly inspired by the indie/downloadable/small games market for a while now, and strongly believe that some of the coolest, funnest, most original work being done in the industry is coming from small outfits that can afford to be different and take risks. So here we are.

No word yet on first projects or anything ... all in good time! But until then, check out our new site:

http://www.moonshotgames.com

And make sure to facebook-tweet your blog-digg! Or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

I know, I know -- I've left the industry to get an MBA, so what am I doing giving a talk on game AI?

I don't really have time for it, but I'm still on the Program Committee and I couldn't turn down an invitation. I've had a lot of big things kicking around in my head for years, so it's great to finally have a chance to let them out.

The talk is "Game Design: An AI Perspective." I couldn't resist the urge to make it rhyme with Will Wright's brilliant lecture from AIIDE '05 (yes, it's kind of incomprehensible with just the slides and no audio, but trust me -- you should have been there!)

I'm also going to be talking a bit about the emergent gameplay design paradigm that's been a slowly growing undercurrent in game design for the last decade or so. Emergent gameplay sometimes works amazingly well. At the same time, there's something missing, and I think the theory is incomplete to the point of being dangerous.

So I'll be talking about that a bit and seeing if we can't put "emergent gameplay" in what I think is a new context.

Hope to see y'all there!

-Paul

Beyond Behavior: Introduction to Knowledge Representation, from the AI Summit at GDC 09

and

Next-Gen Content Creation for Next-Gen AI, my invited talk from FDG 09.

This has been a part of the ongoing effort to get all my old talks and presentations on-line and available off my Naimad Games publications page.

The FDG talk was something of a follow-up to the AI Summit's Photoshop of AI panel, and is a talk I would like to continue to evolve. One of the great things about it is that I had a lot of help making it. Part of the point of the talk was "okay, forget this theoretical future photoshop of AI: how are we making AI content right now?" If you look through the slides, you'll see screenshots of various internal AI tools that some awesome peeps were kind enough to send me.

Hopefully it's interesting, and in the meantime, thanks so much again to Alex and Petra Champandard, Michael Dawe, Chris Jurney, Brett Laming, Steve Mariotti, Jeff Orkin, Stuart Reynolds and Brian Schwab!

This essential book -- the ultimate guide to game camera systems -- has now been released.

I'm thrilled with how it turned out, and I'd like to thank fellow editors Jack Mathews, Ryan Cornelius, Jim Gage, Mark DeLoura, Steve McCrea, Akintunde Omitowoju, Eric Rehmeyer, and Marco Thrush for all their hard work in making this book a reality.

Pick up your copy here.

-Paul Tozour

Minor correction: I don't actually discourage waypoints in all cases as the text of the article seems to suggest. Waypoints are indispensable for a lot of different uses in game AI.

But I do discourage using waypoints for navigation specifically, especially before you've considered some of the alternatives, as per my previous blog post.

(Thanks to Ben Sawyer for alerting me to this competition).

AIIDE '09 is a great opportunity to share your game AI triumphs and tribulations with a mixed audience of industry folks and academic researchers. Once again this year, individuals with game industry experience to share can propose an AIIDE presentation in the form of a brief abstract; a full length paper is not required.

Unlike GDC and similar conferences, AIIDE is attended not only by industry people but by a large contingent of academic AI experts with a strong interest in game AI. Professors and students attend AIIDE in order to learn what is going on in the world of game industry AI programming in the hopes of making their research more relevant and genuinely useful to game programmers. In return, the academic audience offers the industry programmer a broad and detailed knowledge of the latest developments in academic AI. They are potential collaborators in the near term and valuable contacts long term should your future career path take you into academia yourself as a graduate student or instructor.

Please consider proposing an AIIDE presentation! Case studies of recent industry projects, new techniques you have helped pioneer, or talks describing critical issues stemming from technical constraints or game design challenges are all welcome (as are any related topics which come to mind, of course!)

[See http://www.aiide2009.org/ for details -- PT]

I for one welcome our new talking parrot overlords.

Earlier this month I resigned as Design Lead on the Project Offset team at Intel. I'm back in Texas now, and livin' it up.

For those of you who noticed my LinkedIn and Google chat status, yes, I really have decided to retire from the game industry. More about that in a future post.

On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to discuss game design a little bit, since it's a big part of what I've been doing since last August.