"Darren New" wrote:
> I admit it's a pretty vague question, more something to start thinking 
> about than something that would have an answer.
>
> So what bits aren't done yet?  What plug-ins would you want available?

It's a bit fuzzy. Let's take rendering engines as an example. Let's say we 
have the engines A, B and C. Each of them support a set of features, 
including state-of-the-art features, but none of them have it all. So if you 
need *all* state of the art features in your game, no rendering engine 
exists for that. However, some of the engines may come with source code, and 
there's a good chance that extending one of those to include the missing 
features will be less work than making a whole new graphics engine from 
scratch.

> And what's a good tutorial on the state-of-the-art of "AI" in game 
> engines?

You don't need a tutorial for that; you need a bookshelf. There are few 
completely new techniques used in state-of-the-art AI - rather, it's old 
techniques that have been extended, recombined and made more advanced to a 
very high degree. This means that it's not very easy to summarize.

> I look at the unreal engine, and from what I've read so far, "AI" seems to 
> imply "figure out what direction the player is from here, and figure out 
> how to get there."

To a high degree yes, but it's also:
- how to attack the enemy while keeping oneself in minimum danger (seeking 
cover)
- how to cooperate to best take out the enemy while not getting in each 
other's way
- how to percieve and correctly use the environment, like elevators, 
sidewalks, terminals, cannons...

...and that's just in FPS-games. These task sound simple, but in reality 
they're far from "not especially difficult".

> Not especially difficult AI. What sorts of things
> do "AI" programs in games really do?

In games like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto, NPC's must evaluate their needs 
and plan ways to satisfy them - like go to a shop and buy some food, then 
return home, sit at your table and eat the food. If the shop keeper has been 
killed, another shop must be found - or there is the option of stealing 
food. Every decision must furthermore be based on the NPC's knowledge of the 
world, which may be outdated. An internal model of the world must be kept in 
the NPC's memory, so it doesn't seem to know things it isn't supposed to be 
able to know.

Other types of games have completely different requirements for AI. For 
example race-simulations and fighter games.

Rune

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