Game AI Pro: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals

Be forewarned: this book is not an introductory treatment. I read through Buckland and Mark's books on Game AI and even some of the concepts were kind of difficult. Even though some of the concepts were difficult, it is the most up to date book on newer concepts in Game AI. In addition, the book has multiple authors due to it being a collection of articles and opinions. This is usually a bad thing because it makes the book inconsistent. However, given the massive breadth of topics that this book covers, this is perfect because it gives an expert opinion about every topic that it covers. I would recommend it after you have a firm grasp of the basics of Game AI (Programming Game AI by Example and Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI are good starting points).

This is an excellent book on recent game AI methods! If you are writing AI for a game, this is the book to read.

Really good book. Suggest to anyone interested in learning AI. Many modern topics and approaches were talked about and very clear examples were given

Really Awesome book!!!!!! I strongly recommended for anybody passionate on AI for games, and want to know more interesting techniques on the area.

Great delivered on time

super!

Great book on AI techniques. A good read.

I adore this book - I really enjoyed of programming wisdom (the previous lineup from Rabin) and I really enjoyed this, but that enjoyment is because I got what I expected.I shall demonstrate this with an example.I did not know that the book contained information on using Neural Networks to evaluate the utility of different actions for agents in an RTS. However I now know that in Supreme Commander II a Neural Network was used to evaluate whether or not the AI should retreat, gather resources, attack the weakest, attack the strongest ... so forth (Page 391) I now know that programmer's experience in doing this, some of the pit falls, I also know that there is at least 1 successful implementation of NN in games and how well it worked.In SCII a victory condition is to destroy the Armoured Command Unit (ACU - on the front cover) - doing so causes a huge nuclear explosion that damages everything near by, so a fun bit of trivia I learnt: initially the AI would run away from the ACU and not attack, because it would suffer losses, I now know how the fitting curve was SUCCESSFULLY adjusted so the AI recognises the victory condition.I had no idea I'd find that out going in, but I do have a working knowledge (and could implement with minor book-referencing) of a few types of neural networks.I also know thanks to Rabin's earlier books (Wisdom, book 1 I think) that neural networks were used (unsuccessfully - mostly) in Black and White, for the Creature AI - I say unsuccessfully because in a patch to the game a tool-tip was added to make training the creature easier.That is a great example because the paper tells me about how it actually happened in Supreme Commander II, I don't need to know what a neural network is it's a story essentially.So this book is for those who already know the internals of game engines and are comfortable with combinatorial optimisation problems and dare I say being an experienced programmer helps, these made the book VERY enjoyable for me and have warned/demonstrated things that I may build upon myself.I really recommend this book, without hesitation it is a good book, make sure you are in the intended audience before you buy though.If you are, you simply must get this book, it's fascinating, it's like news and a story of something interesting combined.I hope this helps someone, please leave me a comment if you have any feedback, I'd like to get better at writing reviews.

one of the best AI books that simply states the facts and where and when to use these fact. The chapters on Hierarchical Task Network's are great and fairly easy to understand.Great book and worth the £50.

Great book for those learning about how game AI works, including some code snippets.

It's a great book with state of the art articles and many resources that are helpful for the video game developers. The main point in this series of books are the many sources from where the articles are taken.