Blog Archive

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

live notes GDC AI summit, rant

Quick notes from the rant session

AI DEVELOPERS RANT!
SPEAKER/S: Dave Mark (Intrinsic Algorithm), John Funge (Netflix), Borut Pfeifer (Plush Apocalypse Productions), Steve Rabin (Nintendo of America), Kevin Dill (Lockheed Martin) and Adam Russell (University of Derby)

More...

//went out

mby first speaker,
missed talk, only saw ending with a pic of a sexdoll

2nd speaker
working with designers: red pill - blue pill
bottom up design...creativity, emergence...feel open enden...
may argue it is all variation of the same thing. boring. hard to control. frustrates designers.
wall climbing...
top-down design.
complex scenes. narrative. supports cinematic style. allows delivering more unique experiences.
reduces content re-use. does not scale well. reduces re-play value
not enough. not bottum up either.
must support free expressing.
do both. Side-ways design. Pierre Bourdieux
A system of dispositions 1 peception 2 thought 3 action
esternally driven
trancends
-
freedom within structural constraings (fascade pic in bg)
should foucs on multiple npcs. make content declarative, not imperative.
speaker has the most ironic tone.
Adam Russel

3rd. John Funge.
middleware.
not rich, bottom of food-chain.
try to get middleware into platform SDK. Hard.
protect code. Patent.
developers won't want the name of middleware maker in credits (cool thing done by someone else)


4th (Utility person)
basic premises, things we hope to see
why not boolean... floats giving shades of gray. //good point, where is the spectrum
lack of subtlety and nuance, and predictability

utility. Slow. Why would it be slow? Computers good at computation but bad at branching. Don't have to rethink every frame. React to certain even, duck from granade, not ponder going for a beer.

5th
custom script languages

reality
harder to author logic.
with custom scripting language: no tools, intellinsense etc
not stable.
no breakpoints, no stepping, risky to reload. // omg yes the printf, argh.
language design is hard! c++ - 30 years, LUA for 17.
tools hard to make too! 27 years into debuggers (MS)
who makes it? this one guy. Needs to be a megalomaniac. The language taking over it all. They have a degree! The combination is deadly!
2 years on pain working with a scripting language.
hope. Lua.
make games not languages!

6th Dave Mark
annoyed by media. How game ai is reviewed.
and how the reviews are responded to.
"these people hate us"
bad, weak, retarded,...
no-one says anything nice!
nothing noted about the good stuff! If good its not noted, as if not existing.
...what IS cool? need to tell: Fear and sims3.
The more natural the less noticed.
catch 22
#1 dont let the agent do anything stupid...
maybe if:
- more challenging ai
- more life-like
expect more than 'dont be dumb'?