AI Game Programming Wisdom (with CD-ROM) (Game Development Series) (Buch)

Confused about AI? Get this book! This is a nicely bound reference library with a large variety of techniques and algorithms.

You'll get to read articles written by some of the industries' brightest talent. I keep it next to my desk at all times.

It's hard to find good information about game programming and design. The trouble is that people working in the industry have an incentive to keep their techniques secret -- they don't want their competitors to learn them. The people who aren't in the industry can write about games but don't have the experience to back it up.

Game AI Programming Wisdom gives us wisdom from people who have worked on real games. Each section is a short explanation of a particular problem (like pathfinding, tactical reasoning, or pattern recognition). Since they're short and independent, you can pick the section that applies to the problem you're trying to solve and read that without having to read everything in order. However, each section is written by a different person, so if you try to read the book straight through you will be distracted by the change in writing styles and level of detail.

I'm quite glad to see this book. It's actually the first game programming/design book that I purchased. (I'm quite picky when it comes to books. I'm sure Amazon doesn't like that.) Most of the game books I see go into low level programming details. This book teaches you the principles and techniques that will be useful for more than the specific problems they cover.

This is the best book in my library.
Write by professionals, with usefull techniques and well explained details of almost every cool aspects of AI in the game programming world.

Being in the game development business, I am always on the lookout for new and different tricks, techniques and strategies. When most programmers go to the lectures, panels and roundtables at the Game Developers Conference, we are looking to pick up this same sort of material... we share ideas and approaches - but rarely get the chance to get down to the code details to make it easy for us to implement those ideas into our own work. This book makes that possible.

Along the lines of the other "Gems" series of books, this collection is filled with ACTUAL techniques and code chunks that are used by some of the top professionals in the industry. Just flipping through the list of the contributors to the book is like going around the room at one of the AI roundtables at the GDC... in fact, Steve Woodcock and Neil Kirby are 2 of the "3 AI guys" that RUN those roundtables! (The 3rd being Eric Dybsand who has contributed to the "Gems" series but not this title.)

Many books on game development are informative. This one is actually USEFULL. I have personally adopted Steve Rabin's source code from the section "Implementing a State Machine Language" into my own game and it has saved me many hours of development and improved the readability and understandability of my code for the rest of the team. Just that section alone has netted at least a 1000:1 return on the cost of this book. Other sections have given me a different approach on how to handle the economic strategy layer that I could have come upon myself... but was able to implement a lot quicker than if I had done it myself. It was definately worth the price.

Are any of these sections worth the purchase price for YOU? I suppose that depends on how much you value you your time. Once you equate the cost of the book to the man hours you save, it's a no brainer!

Published by the same folks who brought you Game Programming Gems (and edited by one of the more prolific AI authors in that series), AI Game Programming Wisdom provides a wealth of real knowledge by actual game programming professionals, not professional authors. As a game programming professional, the number of game programming books that sit on my shelf is fairly small. Most have nothing interesting or meaningful to offer beyond rudimentary descriptions and concepts.

AI Wisdom is definitely a cut above the rest. The topic selection is intelligent and relevant, and the articles are all of a consistent quality and polish. I've already referenced articles several times when writing production code, and several co-workers have borrowed it when they had a particularly tricky problem to solve. This is simply a must-have resource for any professional AI programmer, period. Or, if you're an amateur or hobbyist looking to see the tricks and techniques professionals use, then this is a book you absolutely can't afford to miss.