Session Name: | Spaces in the Sandbox: Tactical Awareness in Open World Games |
Speaker(s): | Matthew Jack, Mika Vehkala |
Company Name(s): | Moon Collider, IO Interactive A/S |
Track / Format: | AI Summit |
Overview: | The intelligent use of terrain by game agents was a turning point in modern shooter and action games. Gone were the days where the enemies simply ran straight toward the player. However, the need for spatial awareness quickly went beyond static cover points. Designers wanted to incorporate more complex spatial behaviors such as searching, running away, maneuvering for better line of sight, or even group tactics. Environments also became richer and more dynamic, which made manual markup and scripting labor-intensive and brittle, and required more sophisticated techniques for world analysis. This lecture will present two different approaches to dynamically processing spatial information to allow game agents to process their environment in believable, tactically advantageous ways, by using examples from IO Interactive's Hitman: Absolution, work developed at Crytek, and Xaviant's upcoming RPG, Lichdom. |