Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction [Hardcover]

This is the best introduction to AI and computer games available. It's the first book in this area to combine knowledge of academic AI with knowledge of practical computer game development. Most books either are overly academic, with little practical relevance, or overly practical, with little academic substance. In contrast, this book presents a unified approach that begins with simple agents and works up to more complex agents that function in game worlds. The author emphasises enduring design principles, rather than enumerating a list of the latest gee-whiz techniques, which quickly date. The prose is refreshingly straightforward, and the author clearly explains all the concepts. This book is an ideal introduction, and is suitable for youngsters interesting in programming and making games, and also would make a good introductory textbook for a university game AI course. I have been working in the computer games industry for 20 years, yet still found new ideas in the later chapters.

Artificial Intelligence For Computer Games by John David Funge is a solid, straightforward instructional text of basic artificial intelligence theory, the principles from which it derives, and how it is practically applied to program challenging and creative NPC behavior in popular computer games. Black-and-white diagrams and boolean logic symbols help drive the precepts home, though Artificial Intelligence For Computer Games does not contain any computer code per se - this is a manual of basic techniques that can generalize to any programming system. An absolute must-read for anyone striving to program or refine their own games.

The first thing I noticed when I got it up was how thin it was. It reminded me of the small reference O'reilly books. Props for having a hardcover though. I think that it is really called "Artificial Intelligence for Computer Game An Introduction", but you would only know that by seeing it on the first page as that isn't on the cover, side or back.

Before getting into the book I have to mention the code. You get your first glimpse of code on page seventeen where a class header is shown. The class name is tgGameState. Any guess what "tg" stands for? Neither do I. He tries to save on space by having functions with partial words like "inline getNumCharacters()", but the follows it with a pointless comment // Get the number of characters. In appendix B (Programming) it says that code is written to be as easy to understand as possible and is therefore not that efficient. If he had wanted to go for readability he would have expanded the function names, removed the pointless comment, and ditched all the inlines and not of even mentioned the constructor, deconstructor (which aren't defined in the book anyway) etc. It would have been much better to use sudo code.

Onto the actual book. My mention of the reference O'reilly books wasn't just to point out the size. This book really does feel like a jumping off point for AI in computer games. topics are briefly mentioned, but never really gone into depth and to make it sound complicated greek symbols are used when showing a formula. I would have appreciated five or six footnotes per pages telling where to get more information, but most of the time there wasn't (but there was a lot in the back). The first two chapters where more of a crash course in game design. So by the time I was on chapter three and on page 33 you can tell that was nervous that i was 1/3 through the book and really hadn't gotten into any sort of real AI stuff. but it picks up from there. There are a lot of hints for how to integrate AI into games. For example a Non-player controller (NPC) could have an arrow drawn on its chest (where it thinks the player is) and other visuals indicating its internal state. One neat idea was that your NPC could have several decision making units that could be swapped out. When really close to the player the most CPU intensive one would be used and when far away in the locked room the "stand still" one could be used. Perception, Mood, Remembering, Searching, some basic physics were all touched upon. In chapter 7 it gets very close to mentioning/talking about genetic algorithms, but alas it was not to be.

The title really should have had "an introduction" in it. I expected it to be bigger with more in-depth explanations that didn't leave me hanging. On the plus side I found out the name of the orc on the cover is named "Fluffy". For an easy read that is fairly high level on this topic this book isn't that bad, but you probably want to compliment it will others.