Karlsson
Bšrje Karlsson
bffk@cin.ufpe.br
Issues and approaches in Artificial Intelligence middleware
development for digital games and entertainment products.
As the market of digital entertainment products (especially digital games) grows, these products get more and more complex and their users present higher and higher expectations. Because of these facts, artificial intelligence functionalities are no longer held in a secondary level during development. Despite of this, AI applied to entertainment products development, remains a complex domain and relatively unexplored. A great source of solutions and techniques is the academic community. Almost every game genre can benefit from what the many AI areas have to offer in the creation of more realistic and interesting environments and NPCs (Non Player Characters) or even in the control of the narrative flow. With the ever growing necessity of AI functionalities and the fact that some techniques are already in use in game development, supporting tools were created in order to help with these tasks but these tools presented little flexibility. Without a certain level of support, a developer will spend a great part of his time struggling with low-level details or re-implementation of common functionalities. It is believed that the next big step in the quality of AI game techniques depends on the creation of AI middleware, to alleviate developers and allow them to concentrate on creative tasks
related to AI. This work presents issues and approaches regarding the creation of artificial intelligence middleware to aid the development of digital games and entertainment
products in general. It starts with a discussion of the concept and context of an AI middleware (emphasizing the relations of traditional AI areas with computer games). Then, some approaches to the problem of creating an AI middleware are presented, followed by a taxonomy regarding design methods and componentization, and related research. Finally, we discuss the impact of such middleware, open issues to be addressed and future directions.
About the author:
Bšrje Karlsson is Researcher at Centro de Inform‡tica, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in the field of Artificial Intelligence and is currently working in projects at CIn/UFPE and C.E.S.A.R with Motorola, related to development and testing for mobile devices. Bšrje has about 8 years of experience in development for several platforms (from PC and cell phone games to middlewares, network software and high availability systems) and works published about game development, development for mobile devices and network data analysis. Bšrje has a BSc in Computer Science from Centro de Inform‡tica, UFPE and is finishing a specialization in Software Engineering also from Centro de Inform‡tica, UFPE. He is also a new member of the IGDA Artificial Intelligence Interface Standards Committee.
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