Customer Reviews

AI Game Programming Wisdom 4 (AI Game Programming Wisdom (W/CD))

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This is a great reference if you're in need of architectural or conceptual advice regarding AIs. It's not "learn AI in 24 hours" type of book, the reader is assumed to posses substantial knowledge of programming, as implementations aren't usually explained - this is a good thing, because it means there's more pure knowledge inside. (There's a CD with implementations and some sources.)

This book is just a list of tweaks to existing concepts such as FSMs and path finding. The more advanced concepts discussed do not have enough code examples or background info to really educate the reader. A lot of material is by academics that just want to get their names on published articles. For a field that has been hyped for 30 years and can now just barely manage to get a few soccer players to work together in a Wii game I guess we can't expect too much. Unless one is a professional game programmer, which I'm not, and contacts the authors there is almost nothing useful here.

For a basic AI overview, 'hands on ai with java' and 'programming game ai by example' are decent introductions for the programmer to the field depending on whether one prefers java or C++ programming. (most desktop 3d games are written in c++, many internet backend servers run in java).