AI Interface Standards: First Specifications
A Roundtable Discussion of the 2005 Game Developers Conference
Moderated by Alexander Nareyek and Nathan Combs
March 11, 2005, 9:00am - 11:00am
San Francisco, CA, USA
Announcement
| Like in the last years, the AI Interface Standards Committee of the IGDA's AI SIG will present its latest results at GDC. Some actual specifications are being completed this year, and presented in this session. |
| The committee consists of about 70 experts from game studios, academia and middleware companies. The goal is to create interface specifications for game AI functionality (like OpenGL or DirectX in the graphics area). Nowadays, game AI developers rarely have a chance to work on higher-level AI, like believable and interesting NPCs that can learn, have emotions and complex reasoning and interaction skills, or an automated story-telling system that adapts to a player's interests. Much more likely, an AI developer will spend her/his time struggling with low-level pathfinding details. |
| We believe that the next qualitative jump for artificial intelligence techniques in games will be dependent on appropriate interfaces for in-house or external AI middleware, unburdening game AI developers to worry about low-level procedures, and enabling them to focus on higher-level creative AI tasks. To make such interfaces and the related middleware feasible, the development of standards for game AI interfaces is necessary, such that the interfaces do not only match a single game but are applicable in a wider scope. Standards in this area may also provide a basis for AI hardware components in the long run. |
| Alexander Nareyek, Nathan Combs and Gregory Paull, will provide you with an overview of the committee work, and present initial interface specifications. In contrast to the last years' sessions, we will focus on a subset of the committee's working groups. This focus will avoid an "information overflow" for the participants, makes it possible to go into some details, and allows us to hold a more interactive session than in the past years. The subset of areas that will be covered (the committee has working groups on "pathfinding", "steering", "finite state machines", "rule-based systems", "goal-oriented action planning", and "world interfacing") will be decided one or two months before the session, so that the most advanced subset of interfaces can be presented and discussed. |
| Update: |
The work of the following groups will be presented in detail:
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Report
| (Please follow this link for a report on the meeting) |
Links
| AI Interface Standards Committee |
| International Game Developers Association |
| Roundtable of 2004 |
| Roundtable of 2003 |
| Roundtable of 2002 |
Last update:
April 15, 2005 by Alexander Nareyek