The Untouchables: Halo - Combat Evolved

It redefined the firstperson shooter, but is Bungie's masterpiece really bulletproof?
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It redefined the firstperson shooter, but is Bungie's masterpiece really bulletproof?
6Created 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 >
1Autodesk 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 first of our daily reports from GDC 12 in San Francisco.

Find your future working for Gameloft in Madrid, on Magic: The Gathering at Stainless or with DICE in Stockholm.
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 >

A proudly Irish company that provides the world’s developers with chaos to order.

Valve’s co-op take on undead horror redefined online play and scared us witless. Not bad for an apocalypse with just 30 zombies.
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Square Enix's technology director on why AI is one of game development's greatest challenges, and the six-year-old FEAR remains a high watermark.
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Should games take more notice of players' whims? It would make them more meaningful, says Thief co-designer Randy Smith.
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AI is never so scrutinised as it is in stealth games - IO explains how it’s ensuring 47's marks look intelligent.

New machine-learning technique could greatly improve AI design process, researchers claim.
1Yves 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.”

CCP senior programmer Joel McGinnis on how to build AI for the most demanding players, but still teach new generations.
Stanford researchers use electrical fields to control single-celled organisms, recreating Pac-Man.

Conference organisers reveal initial set of five talks for Februaryís San Francisco summit.