Reddit reviews Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI (Applied Mathematics)

Check out Programming Game AI by Example and Artificial Intelligence for Games. They are both decent game AI books, the former actually develops an AI for a soccer simulation in chapter four. There's also [Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI] (http://www.amazon.com/Behavioral-Mathematics-Game-Dave-Mark/dp/1584506849/), it expands on the concepts of utility and decision making which are only touched upon in the first two books. It's purely theoretical but very interesting.

Divided Kingdoms

I've been very busy at work, so development time was limited this week:

• Added health bars above NPCs with their level
  
  
• Containers are now working; it is possible to add and remove items.
  
  
• More work on the item generation algorithm; items now have levels, prefixes and suffixes with stat modifiers working. I still have a ton of work ahead as I only have a few modifiers in my data files and they don't really make sense yet.
  
  
• Inventory list view now only displays categories that have at least one item
  
  
• Fixed blood particle animations after migrating to party system
  
  After reading a book on AI (Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI) and a book on emergence (Emergence in Games), I started reading Game Design Workshop; it's a great book so far. I want to read Designing Virtual Worlds next.
  
  See you next week!

There's a lot of different ways to do this. Something tells me they'll be using Utility Based AI, if only because Dave Mark wrote the book on it. http://www.amazon.com/Behavioral-Mathematics-Game-Dave-Mark/dp/1584506849/

He's given a number of talks on AI at the game developer conference. Most of those are behind a paywall, but this one is free.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015683/Embracing-the-Dark-Art-of

Then here's some slides from an older talk he gave about MMO AI http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1011855/Cover-Me-Promoting-MMO-Player

There is also that book - Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI - it talks about similar concepts, including Utility theory. I'm reading it right now, liking it a lot - just wanted to share.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveMark/285814/

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021848/Building-a-Better-Centaur-AI

https://www.amazon.com/Behavioral-Mathematics-Game-AI-Applied/dp/1584506849

Oh brother... and here I was trying to be all subtle and stuff.

Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI

If you don't know anything about coding, I would start by doing the javascript course at Codeacademy.com, or download Unity for free and follow along with a few of the tutorials for C# that various users have made or that are available for free on their store. Once you've completed those tutorials, play with your finished product, add stuff, tweak stuff, break things and fix them again, until you get a good enough understanding of what's going on with the code.

While you're doing all that, go read Dave's book, Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI, which you can probably check out from your library if you're too poor (or cheap) to buy it. I would also highly recommend going to IntrinsicalAlgorithm.com which is the website for Dave's AI consulting business. There's a number of really good articles posted on there, everything from editorials like the EQN letter, to links to GDC lectures and papers, to amusing stories about unexpected behaviors that sometimes crop up.

I would also highly recommend doing a google search for The Sims AI and utility-based AI. I don't think Dave's approach to utility-based decision making for NPCs is identical to The Sims, but there's a family resemblance that helps understand the ways that utilities are constructed and used to create lists of possible actions and score them.

And watch those free GDC lectures and read the free GDC papers. You might have to read them multiple times to understand what's going on in some places, but they are quite often pretty well laid out and simply enough explained for a layman who puts in some effort to get it.

> AI: "Artificial Intelligence for Games" by Ian Millington

My favorite is Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI, I will definitely check yours :)

Oops, sorry, I missed that short question...

I often revisit those books:

• The Pragmatic Programmer
  
• The Art of Game Design / A Book of Lenses
  
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (more related to getting things done and right)
  
  ...so most are not about game dev only. :)
  
  There's also a book I wanted to read since ages:
  
  Behavioral Mathematics, by Dave Mark
  
  Otherwise I use the internet mostly and learn from articles, GDC, and colleagues.
  
  I guess many around me use other resources apart from books since we're in the industry for so long.
  
  We got specialized, so most new input comes from playing other games, code or game reviews (programmers or designers giving feedback on features), R&D, iterating on features, etc.

he linked this on twitter:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584506849?ie=UTF8&tag=davemark&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1584506849

better ai confirmed?