It's easy to feel a bit beset by doom these days. The other week, I watched the heinous AI-generated "Trump Gaza" video and was so appalled that I impulse-bought a kayaking guide book. It felt like the only sane response was to take to the water and paddle away. Video games are a reliable antidote to existential doom, but layoffs, corporate homogenisation and AI slop are all encroaching on my safe haven, making it more difficult to get a brief reprieve from what's happening in the outside world. Thank God, then, for the Bafta games awards nominations, which reliably remind me that video games are pretty great, actually.

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have expanded the capabilities of embodied intelligence. However, significant challenges remain in real-time decision-making in complex 3D environments, which demand second-level responses, high-resolution perception, and tactical reasoning under dynamic conditions. To advance the field, we introduce CombatVLA, an efficient VLA model optimized for combat tasks in 3D action role-playing games(ARPGs). Specifically, our CombatVLA is a 3B model trained on video-action pairs collected by an action tracker, where the data is formatted as action-of-thought (AoT) sequences. Thereafter, CombatVLA seamlessly integrates into an action execution framework, allowing efficient inference through our truncated AoT strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that CombatVLA not only outperforms all existing models on the combat understanding benchmark but also achieves a 50-fold acceleration in game combat. Moreover, it has a higher task success rate than human players. We will open-source all resources, including the action tracker, dataset, benchmark, model weights, training code, and the implementation of the framework at https://combatvla.github.io/.

It's a question that's plagued our greatest minds for almost three decades. Yes, she appeared on the cover of the Face magazine next to the tagline "bigger than Pammy" in 1997, and yes, in 2006 lad mag FHM created a whole TV special designed to find the "real" tomb raider. But what does science say? In a world where American academics can't use the word "women" without jeopardising their scientific funding, it's a relief that a gambling site called Casino Days is willing to do this important work, recently ranking "The Top 10 Most Attractive Video Game Characters According to Science". Using the so-called "golden ratio" – which determines how beautiful someone is by measuring their facial features – the company has found that Lara Croft is the second most attractive video game character in the virtual world.

Genie often adds this effect to the games it generates. While Genie is an in-house research project and won't be released, Guzdial notes that the Google DeepMind team says it could one day be turned into a game-making tool--something he's working on too. "I'm definitely interested to see what they build," he says.

Last week, at an early showing of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the lights dimmed and the Nintendo logo glowed out over the audience. From the back, a toddler whose parents were probably their age when Mario first burst onto the scene shouted out "Nintendo!" It was a moment that cut through any debates that people might have been having about the film's quality. Ultimately, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is for the children. And the children turned out in force.

In December 2015, the revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the advertising campaign for its forthcoming spring-summer collection. The new range of clothes and accessories would be modelled on screen and in the pages of glossy magazines not by a famous actor or popstar but by a video game character: the pink-haired warrior Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand's creative director told the press he considered Lightning to be the "perfect avatar for a global heroic woman". The fictional character even carried out interviews to promote the partnership. It was not the first time a fashion brand had collaborated with a major video game. Previously, H&M, Moschino and Diesel had made digital clothes for The Sims.

We also compare play styles of people with the style human-like manner, exhibiting a diversity of play styles and exhibited by a built-in AI system. Finally, we report results of strategies. Thus, the development of fighting game AI a short survey, aimed to reveal whether human observers can requires the ability to evaluate these properties. For instance, spot "human-like" traits in the behavior of game characters. it should be possible to ensure that the characters created are believable and diverse. In this paper, we show how an UNIVERSAL FIGHTING ENGINE PLATFORM automated procedure can be used to compare play styles of Universal Fighting Engine (Mind Studios 2021) is a highly individual AIand human-controlled characters, and to assess customizable platform for one-vs-one fighting games human-likeness and diversity of game participants.

Learn Advanced AI for Games with Behaviour Trees Create your own Behaviour Tree API in C# and apply it in the Unity Game Engine Hot & New What you'll learn Description Behaviour Trees (BTs) are an A.I. architecture that provide game characters with the ability to select behaviours and carry them out, through a tree-like architecture that defines simple but powerful logic operations. It can be used across a wide range of game genres from first-person shooters to real-time strategies and developing intelligent characters capable of making smart decisions. The codebase is deceptively simple and yet logical, reusable and extremely powerful. The library is written in C# and implemented in Unity 2020, however will easily port to other applications. In this course, Penny demystifies the advanced A.I. technique of BTs used for creating believable and intelligent game characters in games, using her internationally acclaimed teaching style and knowledge from almost 30 years working with games, graphics, and having written two award-winning books on games AI.

At a typical annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the program is a parade of titles like "A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection." At this year's conference in July, though, something felt different--and it wasn't just the virtual format. Attendees' conversations were unusually introspective about the core methods and objectives of natural-language processing (NLP), the branch of AI focused on creating systems that analyze or generate human language. Papers in this year's new "Theme" track asked questions like: Are current methods really enough to achieve the field's ultimate goals? What even are those goals? My colleagues and I at Elemental Cognition, an AI research firm based in Connecticut and New York, see the angst as justified.

In role-playing games (RPGs) such as the modern crime classic Grand Theft Auto, many players create their in-game characters based on their own appearance. Although today's built-in character customization systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they can involve tedious manual adjustments across dozens or even hundreds of parameters, which can take up to several hours to complete. A team of researchers from the Chinese gaming giant NetEase have developed a method to automatically create players' in-game characters from a standard portrait photo. They break down the details of their method the paper Face-to-Parameter Translation for Game Character Auto-Creation. The character generation process starts by aligning the human player's portrait photo, which is used as the training input for a deep learning-based framework comprising an imitator module and a feature extractor.