PUBLIC MARKS with tags www.gamasutra.com & 2006

Oh yeah… competitive analysis. The most boring part of any product discussion. Why talk about somebody else's market share when you could be waxing rhapsodic about your vertex shaders? Trouble is, the publisher wants to know what they'll be going up against before they invest a few million bucks in your game. So one of the first questions they're going to ask when the presentation's over is, "Who do you see as your main competition?" And the next one will be, "What makes you better than them?" And you'd better be ready with the answers, or you're wasting their time.

The creators of the PathEngine SDK,a toolkit for implementing intelligent agent movement, based on a 'points of visibility' pathfinding solution implemented over arbitrary 3D ground meshes, have announced the release of V5.01. Key features are pathfinding through overlapping geometry, dynamic obstacle management, and content processing functionality.

Three things must happen in order for there to be gameplay: * The player must get information about the state of the game. * The player must be able to affect the game, creating new game states. * New game states must be communicated to the player prompting further actions In addition in almost all types of game: * The game creates new states without the player's input.

Much of the work in game AI has focused on the ‘big' problems: path planning, squad planning, goal-directed behavior, etc. The result is characters that are capable of increasingly intelligent behavior. However, acting intelligently and acting aware and sentient is not the same thing. But if we are to create the kind of compelling and emotional characters upon which the next generation of computer games will be based, we must solve the latter problem, namely how to build characters that seem aware and sentient.

Cobertura do DICE 2006

Ten years ago, Sony brought three dimensions, as well as the concept of "maturity", to the video gaming masses. And yet, when many people think back to the "PlayStation era", a hyper realistic character in a 3D landscape doesn't necessarily come to mind. Instead, they think of a flat cartoony dog that could rap.

The following is a selected excerpt of Chapter 4 from Patterns in Game Design (ISBN 1-53450-354-8) published by Charles River Media, Inc.