Yet another entry in my weekly Developer Discussion column at AIGameDev.com. In The Little-Used Tools of Game AI, I continue an informal poll from the 2008 GDC AI Roundtables. We were all asked what types of technologies and algorithms we were using in commercial games.

I used a metaphor of a Swiss Army Knife... lots of cool tools that mostly go unused. Here's a blurb from the intro.

Looking through web sites, books, and the various conferences such as GDC and AIIDE, there is an endless parade of esoteric, seemingly mystical techniques. As perpetual students in our rapidly-changing art, we read and attend with a reverent demeanor of an exploratory scientist. We soak up all the knowledge and ponder the applications and implications. We engage in heady, philosophical discussions with our peers. We exclaim our exuberance and proclaim our allegiance to new methodologies. And then, upon returning home to our individual, pragmatic realities. We resign ourselves to the relatively bland, yet utilitarian knife and screwdriver: Finite State Machines and Pathfinding.

And what of the other tools in the Swiss Army Knife of game AI? What about the planning and fuzzy logic? The lofty towers of neural networks and genetic algorithms? Game theory and reasoning under uncertainty? Influence maps? Minimax plays a killer game of Tic Tac Toe, right? Flocking? We've all seen articles on flocking! Not being used? Wow... there sure are a lot of tools in this knife. We can all see places where they may come in handy. Granted, some of them may be like trying to cut firewood with a 2-inch saw - but aren't some of them truly useful? So why don't we use them in the real world of creating our pretend worlds rather than simply pretending we are going to use them in the real world?

Jump on over to AIGameDev and read the full column. And, since it is a developer discussion column, please take a moment to continue the poll and post a comment.

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