Cognitive Computing A research blog by Ashwin Ram, PhD

Behavior authoring for computer games involves writing behaviors in a programming language and then iteratively refining them by detecting issues with them. The main bottlenecks are a) the effort required to author the behaviors and b) the revision cycle as, for most games, it is practically impossible to write a behavior for the computer game AI in a single attempt. The main problem is that the current development environments (IDE) are typically mere text editors that can only help the author by pointing out syntactical errors.

In this paper we present an intelligent IDE (iIDE) that has the following capabilities: it allows the author to program initial versions of the behaviors through demonstration, presents visualizations of behavior execution for revision, lets the author define failure conditions on the existing behavior set, and select appropriate fixes for the failure conditions to correct the behaviors. We describe the underlying techniques that support these capabilities inside our implemented iIDE and the future steps that need to be carried out to improve the iIDE. We also provide details on a preliminary user study showing how the new features inside the iIDE can help authors in behavior authoring and debugging in a real-time strategy game.

Read the paper:

An Intelligent IDE for Behavior Authoring in Real-Time Strategy Games

by Manish Mehta, Suhas Virmani, Yatin Kanetkar, Santi Ontañón, Ashwin Ram

www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-08-08.pdf