Chapter 2. The Design of Intelligence

Key Topics

• An Engineer's Perspective

• Traditional Approach

• A Modern Approach

• Required Background

• AI Development Process

This chapter looks under the hood of game engines, revealing how designs are brought to life by the artificial intelligence (AI). As expected, developing a system capable of providing nonplayer characters (NPCs) with intelligence is an imposing engineering task.

The next few pages tackle the following topics:

• How to move from the design to the AI development

• The traditional approach to game AI

• A different approach to game AI, relying more on learning and embodiment

• The background knowledge required to pull this off

• An outline of the AI development process, examining the important stages

The principles presented here apply throughout the rest of this book.