AI Roundtable Moderator’s Report

Game Developer’s Conference 2000, March 10-12

Steven Woodcock

Ferretman@gameai.com

 

Background

Eric Dybsand, Neil Kirby, and myself have conducted the AI roundtables at the Game Developer’s Conference for four years now. Since the games industry is an ever-evolving forum so too are our roundtables, and we again modified our format slightly this year to accommodate feedback and requests from roundtable participants at the 1999 GDC.

Our roundtables this year attempted to span the breadth of the game industry by addressing different topics on each day. Day One (Friday) were the general AI sessions, in which participants in all three roundtables were encouraged to discuss any aspect of game AI and game AI development that they chose. Discussions were intended to be wide-ranging and free-flowing, with no particular focus on anything beyond what the participants in each session felt like talking about.

Day Two (Saturday) had focused sessions, each dealing with a particular genre of games and their related AI issues. Neil's session took on the subject of role-playing games (RPGs) and first-person shooters, while Eric focused on the sports game arena. My session was devoted to strategy games (both real-time and turn-based). This devotion of sessions to specific arenas of game development were intended to help satisfy attendees who had questions or comments specific to a current project, which might otherwise not come up in a more general discussion.

Day Three (Sunday) threw out the three parallel roundtables format in favor of a more panel-oriented discussion. The topic was "AI for Beginners"; in this session, we attempted to address the needs of developers new to the field of game AI who often didn’t know where to start. We also tried to reach out to artists, producers, and others involved in the game development process who were interested in the field of game AI but who really didn’t know much about it. Our hope with this session was that we would be able to both help developers new to the field and aid in bridging the "understanding gap" that can crop up between AI developers and others on their team.

Friday, March 10th

My first session was attended by 15 (out of a total of 52) between the three sessions) people, rather a drop from last year’s first session. Given that we were in direct conflict with the Bill Gates keynote address, however, this was completely understandable—in retrospect I’m rather surprised we did as well as we did. (In the future, however, it might behoove the GDC conference organizers to put more space in the schedule to avoid conflicts such as this.)

I began by briefly covering our intentions for the roundtable sessions (described above) and then announced our Third Annual AI Programmer’s Dinner. After a brief discussion on the details of the time and place of this event we began talking game AI.

The roundtable discussion was very lively, though it varied somewhat from previous sessions in that we tended to cover fewer topics more deeply. It was definitely something of a rude shock when we ran out of time…we could have easily run longer if we’d had the time. Nearly 2/3 of the developers present (9) were experienced AI programmers, and virtually all of them were actively involved in a current project. The highlights:

Also discussed briefly in conjunction with this topic was the matter of what developers would be willing to pay for such an SDK, should a useful one actually be available. Most felt that price was not a particular object; developers are used to paying (or convincing their bosses to pay) thousands of dollars for toolkits, SDKs, models, etc. today.

This tells us that if somebody can develop an AI SDK that would be flexible enough to meet the demands of developers they should be able to pay the rent.

A quick poll revealed some interesting statistics. Of the 15 attendees, most reported average CPU availability for their work at anywhere from 20-30%. Two turn-based games were in the works, giving those developers an effective 100% availability if necessary (though they were both quick to add that they did quite a bit of processing during the human player’s turn during otherwise idle CPU cycles). This gave an overall average CPU availability of 25%, a huge increase from the 10% last year’s group reported. Given the increased capability of today’s CPUs, combined with the larger percentages of resources being allocated, one can only conclude that companies are taking good game AI seriously.

A second poll revealed that game AI developers had plenty of manpower to get their jobs done too. Eleven attendees revealed that their project had at least one full-time AI developer, while three others reported one or more "half-time" programmers devoted to game AI.

Saturday, March 11th

Day Two was much more heavily attended than Day One, thus proving that we’d been significantly impacted by Bill Gates’ talk the day before. My room filled up quickly with 26 people and we began the session roughly 10 minutes early.

The focus for my roundtable this day was on Strategy Game AI, and we got started quickly with several participants having either comments to make or questions to ask. Overall we covered more topics in somewhat less detail than the first day, with some repetition:

 

Sunday, March 12th

Day Three—the "AI for Beginner’s" session. As described above Neil, Eric, and myself combined our three sessions into a panel discussion in the largest room. We could have easily taken more people—as it was we packed the room with 64 attendees and had to turn away a few others during the course of the hour. Neil and Eric took most of the questions while I recorded answers on a whiteboard and drew examples as needed.

Though it started slowly the session went quickly…we had more topics to cover than we could have possibly done in an hour. What follows are the questions I got onto paper together with the best summation of our answers (and related discussion) I could get down:

Conclusions

The GDC 2000 AI roundtables (and subsequent AI Programmer’s Dinner) were a huge success and built well on previous years. Though turnout was slightly less overall than in the 1999 sessions (215 vs. 236 in 1999) we attribute this to our first day being scheduled opposite Bill Gate’s keynote.

Our current approach for topic selection (general discussion on day one, genre specific discussions on day two, and a beginner’s session on day three) seems popular and I’m inclined to continue with it. Our biggest complaint seemed to have been a familiar one—the roundtables are too short at one hour! GDC might wish to consider allowing a 1 ½ hour format in future conferences.

This was fun, and we should definitely do it again for GDC 2001.

 

 

Steven Woodcock

Ferretman@gameai.com

www.gameai.com