AI

Created by Michael Cook, a computer scientist at Imperial College London, Angelina iteratively designs games using a technique dubbed co-operative evolution. The AI separately builds aspects, or species, of a game - selected from a list of enemies, power-ups and level architecture - then combines the element before simulating a human player's progress through it. More >

Autodesk has announced a licence agreement with Nintendo that will enable developers of Wii U games to use its Gameware technology. Announced at GDC in San Francisco, the deal gives Nintendo and its licensed developers access to popular UI solution Autodesk Scaleform, the Autodesk Kynapse AI middleware, and Autodesk HumanIK, used for interactive character animation. More >

The DirectX 11-based Luminous Engine can ape the visual fidelity of digital photographs, while a suite of development tools called Luminous Studio will feature advanced cloth and fluid simulation, realtime reflections, animation and AI, and will apparently reduce development costs by up to 30 per cent. More >

Unity Technologies has used its Unite 11 conference to confirm which of the features it announced in July will be added to Unity3D in its forthcoming 3.5 update. More >

Yves Jacquier, executive director of production services at Ubisoft Montreal, believes AI will be the strongest feature of new console hardware. "AI has always been the real battleground," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "In general the industry expects that graphics will not be a strong feature any more... Obviously, graphics are better for marketing purposes because you can show things. AI you can't show… The challenge is that, if you see an AI coming, you've failed. And that's a problem we have to overcome as we create the impression of flawless, seamless worlds." Achieving this goal on current hardware is a tricky proposition, according to Jacquier. "Our challenge with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox [360] is that we're extremely limited in what we can do. It's a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time. We think that the next generation of consoles won't have these limits any more.”