Preface

Game AI is a combination of decision making and animation playback. Although classic or academic AI is focused solely on finding the right decision to make, game AI is responsible for acting on numerous decisions over time. Treating game AI independent from animation is a classic mistake that this book avoids by integrating animation and locomotion systems immediately into the AI systems. This subtle difference of decision making and execution changes many of the aspects that game AI programmers have to focus on.

The other large issue with game AI is regarding the specific needs and implementation strategies that are genre-specific. In order to prevent a watered-down approach, this book focuses on one specific genre, which is the first- and third-person action genre. Limiting the AI to this decision allows for an in-depth, tutorial-based approach of creating a full AI system. The overall goal of this book is to create an AI sandbox composed of professional level C and C++ open source libraries exposed to an AI system scripted in Lua.