The Total Beginner's Guide to Game AI

This article will introduce you to a range of introductory concepts used in artificial intelligence for games (or'Game AI' for short) so that you can understand what tools are available for approaching your AI problems, how they work together, and how you might start to implement them in the language or engine of your choice. We're going to assume you have a basic knowledge of video games, and some grasp on mathematical concepts like geometry, trigonometry, etc. Most code examples will be in pseudo-code, so no specific programming language knowledge should be required. Game AI is mostly focused on which actions an entity should take, based on the current conditions. This is what the traditional AI literature refers to as controlling'intelligent agents' where the agent is usually a character in the game – but could also be a vehicle, a robot, or occasionally something more abstract such as a whole group of entities, or even a country or civilization. In each case it is a thing that ...