Hardware News

F.E.A.R. Dev Diary

Joe "OuTkAsT-1" Topolnisky

2005-09-22 00:01:00.0


GameSpot has posted the second part of Monolith's developer diary regarding the AI in their upcoming first person shooter, F.E.A.R.. Here's some juice:

Recent advances in AI have allowed game designers to give their non-player characters basic decision-making capabilities with predefined finite state machines (aka FSM). This standard FSM technology allows for goal-directed characters that are able to activate a goal in response to a situation. However, as Jeff Orkin, the game's AI architect, notes, "Once a goal is activated, the character runs through a predetermined sequence of steps, hard-coded into the goal. The embedded plan can contain conditional branches, but these branches are predetermined at the time the goal is authored." While this can sometimes give the impression of a "thinking" NPC, this is essentially a mildly more versatile form of scripting. The characters have limited and predetermined behavior patterns, and the rigidity of the "sequence of steps" often forces recognizable "dumb" behavior that breaks the immersion of the game.


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