Answering the AI Wish List
rm310 – 5:15 (15 min. late – had to change buildings) (GDC summary)

My Summary:
Uh, basically this talk was way over my head. But I found it fun to sit in on a couple talks like this, just to see how the big brains rollllll. when the roll out. the discussion. stuff. uh…

Raw Notes:
* talking about tradeoff per frame between graphics and AI routines. one suggests just spreading AI needs over multiple frames. another points out “this tradeoff is core to their job. Sorry there’s no easy answer, guys.”

* Chris talks about DoubleFine’s “roBert” program, which took over any unused xboxs in office automatically, and ran gameplay LUA scripts. which were made and queued by a game tester, named Bert (also a programmer). The second guy in, who worked on china town wars, posits about replacing a lot of gametester needs with extensive scripting. (ex: hit a button 100 times.). Chris mentions this automated tester (roBert) helped graphics dudes as well, as they could see animations going wrong (just by turning their heads to look at gameplay on their neighbor’s machine, from time to time).

* Talking about the need (lost art) for randomly generated assets (content creation). Civ guy (first in line on left) talks about problems with laying out resources. mentions you really have to sell upper management on taking a while before results get good. “like all AI tasks really.” (sucks.sucks.sucks. slightly better. slightly better. etc.)
…
They all nod about how awesome spelunky is (david yu), and didn’t think it could work until they saw his work. argues that there hasn’t really been a AAA title that has high quality art and random generation. mentions Hellgate london – but also that it was panned for repetition. mentions L4D… but… i didn’t catch his point. “it was interesting to him.” ?

speaker interjects his own point about a trend he’s noticed in modern animation which is to leverage costly mocap with sort-of procedural mixups at runtime. (as L4D leverages graphics against rulesets at runtime).

… well. they wrap up. Smart guys making it look easy. wee.