Last night at the Philadelphia chapter IGDA meeting Chris Jurney of Kaos Studios, and formerly of Relic Entertainment gave a talk on his work as an AI programmer, specifically discussing his efforts on the RTS game "Company of Heroes."

Though his whole presentation was thought-provoking, one aspect I found particularly interesting was his discussion of how the behavior of the game AI was made to match the player’s perspective of the world. Meaning, since players could look down on the action and survey many interactions at once, the AI for the soldiers was calibrated to behave more so with that type of understanding, rather than simply what they would be able to see themselves on the ground. The game designers found that players tend to base their expectations for their troops on their own level of awareness.

So effectively this means that enemy soldiers in the battlefield could "see" each other more readily than they would in say, a first person shooter. In an FPS, the player has a ground view of the action, and expects the AI to deal with the same limited viewpoint. Not being a regular player of RTS games, I had never considered this variation before and it got me wondering how often different developers have to learn these rules on their own. Hmm, maybe we can get Chris to write a book…

-Jason