for learning AI to be appropriate in game development...
"Developers just don't seem to know what's going on in the AI scene and what current technology is capable of."
Perhaps. But they often have a number of good reasons to forego learning AI that haven't been mentioned here.
RoB put it nicely "[To] ensure that learning is effective in games...".
For learning AI to be effective in the overall creation of a commercial game (let's assume a console game, because that's the biggest market), the following should hold:
- the learning solution shouldn't be more expensive (resource wise) than the manually developed one; however, learning involves overhead
- the level designer should remain in control, because it typically is the level designer that directs most of the game play; learning AI takes control away from him (and makes it harder for him to design the level)
- developing the learning solution should not take much more time than writing some standard behavior with a couple of variants (few players notice the difference)
- the learning AI should not consume a larger bite of the test budget (which is tough to achieve, because you now need to test against AI that grows undesired behavior)
- the learning AI should not be more difficult to debug (and understand);
- the learning AI should not be more difficult to develop (and here you might blame the AI developers for not being up to date with the latest techniques).
If a 20 men development team is relying on you to come up with solid AI, on schedule, within the budgets (memory, ms / frame, developer effort, test effort), investing in a learning AI (vs a hard-wired traditional AI) isn't an obvious thing to do, unless part of the game design explicitly calls for it.
Even then, the learning part is a risk: will the results be good enough, or should we prepare for a manually designed fall-back?
In other words: yes, probably there are a number of game developers who are not willing to consider learning AI. But, on the other hand, for learning AI to be appropriate, it needs to address more game development concerns than just the AI theory.
William
|