[gameAI_news] Game AI Newsletter (09/2006)

[gameai_news at igda.org]

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, I have started a professorship at the National
University of Singapore, and I need to apologize as my e-mail responsiveness
consequently suffered quite a bit from all the related activities, like
setting up my new game AI labs (http://www.ai-center.com/ii-labs/)! Looks
like Singapore was a great choice though, and there's a vivid and very
enjoyable game development scene and a ton of government support. But back
to the main topic!


There were lots of events related to game AI recently, and here are some
links to their proceedings:

ONLINE RESOURCE/PROCEEDINGS:
 Proceedings of the SAB'06 Workshop on Adaptive Approaches for Optimizing
Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games
 http://www.mip.sdu.dk/~georgios/gamesWorkshop

ONLINE RESOURCE/PROCEEDINGS:
 Proceedings of the ICAPS 2006 Workshop on AI Planning for Computer Games
and Synthetic Characters
 http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/ICAPSWorkshop/WorkshopProgram.html

The next two articles are from the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium on
Video Game Design:

ONLINE RESOURCE/ARTICLE:
 Big Fast Crowds on PS3
 by Craig Reynolds
 http://www.research.scea.com/pscrowd/

ONLINE RESOURCE/ARTICLE:
 Emotional Remapping of Music to Facial Animation
 by Steve DiPaola and Ali Arya
 http://www.csit.carleton.ca/~arya/pubs/vgs-06.pdf
 (and other interesting work at: http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/about.php and
http://www.csit.carleton.ca/~arya/pubs.html)

The Second Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
Conference (AIIDE-06) was held in June. The papers are not directly online,
but you might be lucky if you search the net for articles that sound
interesting:
 http://www.aiide.org/papers.html

And some other new game AI articles on the net:

ONLINE RESOURCE/ARTICLE:
 Anticipatory AI and Compelling Characters
 by Bruce Blumberg
 http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060216/blumberg_01.shtml

ONLINE RESOURCE/ARTICLE:
 Evolving Pathfinding Algorithms Using Genetic Programming 
 by Rick Strom
 http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060626/strom_01.shtml

... and even lots of more material in printed book form:

BOOK:
 Artificial Intelligence for Games 
 by Ian Millington 
 Morgan Kaufmann
 
http://books.elsevier.com/us/mk/us/subindex.asp?isbn=0124977820&country=Unit
ed+States

BOOK:
 AI Game Programming Wisdom 3
 edited by Steve Rabin
 Charles River Media
 http://www.charlesriver.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=124279

BOOK:
 Game Programming Gems 6
 (including some articles on game AI)
 edited by Michael Dickheiser
 Charles River Media
 http://www.charlesriver.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=124038


Some forthcoming events:

EVENT:
 Artificial Intelligence for Games
 (workshop/seminar as part of the London Games Festival)
 October 4, 2006 
 Imperial College London, London, UK
 
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/businessdevelopment/newsandevents/events/aigamese
vent

EVENT:
 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2007)
 April 1-5, 2007
 Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, US
 Paper submission deadline: October 31, 2006
 http://csapps.essex.ac.uk/cig/2007/


While my very own game AI company - Digital Drama Studios - is folding down
because I left the wonderful city of Prague (a new company in Singapore will
certainly be set up sometime soon!), the game AI middleware scene is going
more strong than ever!

Here is a new entry in this category: TruSoft and their Artificial Contender
engine, which specializes in capturing human behavior. In their words, "the
solution can enable characters in a game to emulate playing styles of humans
and to adapt." Check out their technology at:
 http://www.trusoft.com/

Havok advances to the AI area as well, and has just launched their new Havok
Behavior tool/SDK, which is based on hierarchical finite state machines:
 http://www.havok.com/content/view/285/79/

You may also want to have a look at Chris Crawford's Swat (their interactive
storytelling authoring tool) that has just been released as a kind of
pre-alpha version:
 http://www.storytron.com/swat/index.htm


I hope you guys will meet your holiday deadlines and have a lot of fun
during the next months when testing out the forthcoming games and consoles!

While I skipped GDC this year, I'll be making quite a "conference tour" in
November and December (Singapore/Perth/Montreal/Liverpool), so if you'll be
at the same spot, feel free to drop me a message.


Best,
Alexander Nareyek <alex at ai-center.com>
Chair of the IGDA's AI SIG
http://www.igda.org/ai/


P.S.: 
Did I miss anything? If you want to add anything for the next newsletter,
please let me know!

P.P.S.:
By the way, just as a note - please don't ask about including "general AI"
links in this newsletter. The field of AI is much too broad to cover, and
there are other newsletters out there that target the general topic in a
much better way. This newsletter is only for links/events/resources with a
strong "game" emphasis.


--

Alexander Nareyek
http://www.ai-center.com/home/alex/

Block E4, Level 5, Room 28
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
National University of Singapore
4 Engineering Drive 3
Singapore 117576

Tel (office): +65 6516 5153
Tel (mobile): +65 9223 1756
Fax: +65 6779 1103

--