bit-tech.net - How AI in Games Works

UK tech site bit-tech.net has a geeky in depth look at the nuts and bolts of AI in gaming, from the basics of the state machine to how it functions in NPC view and pathfinding in terrain, destructible environments,  and how it's affected by hardware acceleration.

Here's a bit from the conclusion about where it's headed in future:

AI is clearly becoming much more important in games, but it still has to compete with pretty graphics when it comes to processing resources, and it’s often at the bottom of the pile.

Creative Assembly’s Richard Bull notes that "there’s still this disturbing mindset among programmers, particularly game programmers, that if the AI is taking any kind of considerable chunk of time, that’s a really bad thing. It’s only just getting to the stage now where people regard it as important enough to deserve this chunk of time in a game. If your graphics rendering is taking up 50 percent of your CPU time it’s like 'well, never mind, it looks great', but if you try to tell people that you have this really intelligent decision-making system that’s taking up 30 percent of the CPU time, they’ll say 'you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, it’s badly programmed' and so on".

However, with GPU hardware support and multithreading becoming more widespread, hopefully, we’ll see AI using a greater amount of resources. Just take a look at your CPU resources when you’re running Fallout 3 or GTA IV, and you’ll see that your CPU is being hammered. Anything that can provide game developers with more AI processing power will be warmly welcomed by the gaming industry, and we can then progress to even more sophisticated AI systems.