Completed in February, the relatively small French artificial intelligence specialist Kynogon is hardly a household name when it comes to gaming technology, although its middleware has been used in the likes of Crackdown, Fable II and The Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows Of Angmar. Its impact as the key driver of Autodesk’s new Games Technology Group will certainly be high profile when it’s finally unveiled, something expected in 2009.

Michel Kripalani, Autodesk’s senior games industry manager, explains how the Kynogon deal fitted into the company’s long-term strategy. “We saw the need to move from the asset creation space,” he says. “With the next generation of gaming platforms, the focus is going to be on runtime simulations. Art tools are also becoming more tied in to physics and AI, so we wanted a team that could develop, market, sell and support middleware. It’s different to our primary business, so that’s why we purchased Kynogon.”

Three new runtime components are planned, each of which will be available as a standalone package as well as being fully integrated with the other two plus thirdparty game engines such as Epic’s Unreal Engine 3. It’s an approach Kripalani refers to as an ‘à la carte’ menu. The first is a character-oriented physics system so a character can interact with a dynamic, physics-based world. Next is the artificial intelligence piece, which will provide the smarts for characters to act in a believable manner.

Then there’s the animation system so characters can walk, crawl and climb over obstacles. Ultimately it boils down to an integration of physics, AI and character animation. “All these technologies are progressing, but as one progresses the others have to keep up or believability is lost. If you have this great exploding world but the character can’t climb over a one-metre piece of rubble, the whole illusion is destroyed,” says Kripalani.

Finally there’s the need, in turn, to integrate this technology back into Maya and 3DS Max and maybe now even XSI too. “It’s vital that artists are in control of the process, not programmers,” Kripalani argues. “Once everything in-game is procedural, artists have to be creating those procedures, and that’s the direction we’re taking Max and Maya.”

As for the timeline, he’s fairly pragmatic: “I expect we’ll get a large portion of the job done with this generation of hardware, but what we’re being clear about is where we’re going. We’ll get there in small stages. We’ve seen it in films with phenomena such as the Uncanny Valley. Those are the sort of complex problems we’re going to have to solve to get believable characters into games, but that’s the goal.”

So after successfully completing one long-term business game over the past decade, it seems that Autodesk has thrown over the board and is enthusiastically starting to place its counters again. This time, it’s the middleware companies that should be contemplating their options.