The Hard Science of Making Videogames

twoblackeyes writes "PopSci delves into the 10 greatest technical challenges faced by game developers today, and the technology that will hopefully make them a thing of the past. At the top of every dev's wish list is increased realism: realisitic fire, water, enemy AI, material physics, etc. Here directly from the developers where the tech stands today, and where it will likely be tomorrow. '4. Artificial Intelligence - Problem: Once upon a time, the bad guys in videogames wandered around mindlessly, shooting at you while they waited to die. That doesn't cut it anymore. Players demand sophisticated enemies to fight and reliable in-game allies with which to fight them. Thing is, it's freaking complicated, and it eats up processor speed. "We're faking just enough smarts to make it work," says Mathieu Mazerole, lead engineer on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Status: Imbuing characters in a game with lifelike decision-making ability involves employing the kind of high-level logic theories--learning decision trees, mobile navigation, finite-state machine models--used by top robotics engineers.'"

Re:Only a worthless fluff piece like this

[Jarjarthejedi]

Agreed. I read the article a while ago when it came out in print, it's not supposed to be a ranked list. And the AI in games like Rainbow 6 can already surprise you (I got flanked in my last game by a pair of particularly enterprising AIs), good looking water is much, much harder to find.

Only a waterless piece like this

[Anonymous Coward]

The water in Farcry and the Exile games was very good. However with that being said. When in a FPS, water isn't going to be the most important thing (unless you're making "Abyss:the shooter").

Re:It's not that this list sucks..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, it would be really fucking cool if you could play a game like Zork but where nearly every puzzle doesn't have a single, contrived answer."

People have played with the genre since the days of Zork. I've played some text adventures with physics, AI and non linear stories.

The question of how you do realistic physics in a text adventure is an interesting one. :)
Play some recent games, they have come on a bit.