AI for Game Developers

That book had marks of usage on the cover, but overall, all the pages inside were almost like new. Low price, high value item.

As good as new!

This book introduces the reader to three key AI programming ideas, broadly, movement, pathfinding, and decision making.The movement section covers intercepting and following, pathfinding provides a lot of good practical information on problems and algorithms to solve them, and the decision making section provides a good introduction to genetic algorithms, neural nets and fuzzy logic, topics which are hard to study abstractly on one's own time (at least for me.)There are lots of code examples, and the math is accessible to anyone who at least suffered through high school calculus, regardless of whether any useful memory remains :). The intent of the code is explained after the code snippets, which is an excellent and thoughtful addition to such a book, since so many authors write code snippets, and force the reader to thoroughly understand them in order not to miss important points in the work, even though the reader may have no intention of ever actually implementing that code, and as a result, would rather not laboriously dissect tens or hundreds of code snippets in order to understand the full work.

I bought this book because of the chapter O'Riley had on its site (Flocking) and the general experience I have had with O"Riley in the past. While there is plenty to learn from this text, its not for the faint of heart or new programer. There is a lot that needs to be done to get set up for this.My first issue is that some of the code seems just a little too complex for a beginner. While I respect the features hes trying to put in, it can clutter up the main point of what is happening, and makes learning the basic principles harder.It seem the writter assumes you read his other book 'Physics for game programer' since he refers to it several times.Download the sample code for the book and you will see what I mean.Then there is no discussion of the graphic package being used. I tried to do the stuff with GDI+ and ended up switching to DirectX because the flickering was so bad. Some discussion on setting up a test and development enviroment to run these projects on would have been helpful.Oh and it was written in C+. Okay, no big deal, but a warning would have been nice. I can handle C+, but I do my work now in C#. Since it was written in an OO language, a little back ground on system design would have been helpful too.Asking too much? While the info there is good, there are a lot of obstacles for a 'beginner' to handle. I'm motivated though, and bought his phyiscs book just to see if it helps out any.

Terrible and useless even for a book on AI for budding game developers. The theory and explanations in this book are sometimes decent but more often than not quite lacking. (es: in one of the first chapter the author uses Bresenham algorithm without taking the time to explain it). The use of tile based examples introduce unnecessary overhead, and the continuos attempts to introduce physics related code and references to the author's other book on game physics are just plain annoying. The range of subjects covered is very broad (chasing and evading, pathfinding, emergent behaviours, rule based reasoning, bayesian networks, neural networks, fuzzy logic, finite state machines, genetic algorithms), definitely too broad to treat each of these subject in decent depth and with clarity. Example code is of low quality and just superficially object-oriented. If you are looking for a decent introduction to game AI I recommend Matt Buckland "Programming Game AI by Example" and "AI Techniques for Game Programming".