Programming Game AI by Example

I think this is a great book. Clearly written and does not not assume any prior knowledge. I must say that I 've only used it for the implementation of steering behaviours until now so I can not comment on the rest. Also a minor disadvantage is that I do not have a way to compile the code on a mac (please let me know if I am wrong on that).

I found this book to be a fantastic resource for AI Game Development. It showed me new techniques on implementing simple agents that displayed intelligent behaviour, without causing the resulting program to be a resource hog on the computer. It teaches 'weak' AI techniques instead of all the 'strong' AI I was taught at university. This makes the book more useful for game development and quite easy to follow. I found the most useful chapters were on building autonomous agents and the chapter devoted to pathfinding. This is not just the usual pathfinding techniques that show you how to get from A to B in the shortest distance, but how to set up your program in order to balance the need of your agents with the capabilities of the CPU, such that your agents wont slow down your program to an unbearable frame-rate, yet still show intelligent behaviour.

A good book for game AI to get you started, the text reads fine and is easy to follow. The code on the other hand is rather messy, and I agree with the other reviewer that pseudo code would have been a better option - you have to read through all the authors little coding habits to root out what you need. Still, worth a read because the AI descriptions are very well put together.

A great read. Tells you all you need to start implementation in your own code in a very short time. A bit heavy on the maths for some perhaps but I guess that is the nature of the topic so the way the author deals with it is exceptionally well done. The examples are great and really show the good and bad methods. I've seen both in games I own since reading this book and know how their underlying coding works now. Well worth buying though the full price is steep so I got a second-hand copy...

First off, it's a good read as it is so well written. There is an invaluable basic maths/physics primer at the start (in fact I still refer to that section a year later). Then a nice gentle intro with FSMs (although, on my girlfriends orders, I had to rewrite the tasks given to the Miner's Wife). From there it's Steering Behaviours, Sports AI, Pathfinding etc (all the usual suspects) but the examples for each are superb. I did struggle slightly translating the code (pseudo-code would have been nice) but that's a minor point.

Practical and useful tutorials on implementing various kinds of AI behaviour in computer games. Uses C++ and LUA scripting. Excellent working examples with efficient coding.

Perfect book for who is starting facing game programming. Well explained. It gives you the instruments to operate quickly.

Hello, I just want to say I have no problem with the book, and its contents, infact its quite good (my uni uses it as reference material). How ever, before you buy please read what I have to say. The book is 500 a5 pages long, and has helpful images to explain various points. But its the back cover where I found my mayor problem, the RRP price of this book is $49.95 (about £35 at time of writing), and amazon are selling this for nearly double that. I understand amazon faces importing charges (assuming it wasn't printed in the UK), but even so, selling a book for almost double what it retails for. Also, if you want this book, check the American site, and see how much shipping is, it probably cheaper to buy it from there. http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Game-Example-Mat-Buckland/dp/1556220782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369083688&sr=8-1&keywords=programming+game+ai+by+example :)

Programming Game AI By Example by Mat Buckland is one of those books that comes highly recommended and was one I had been meaning to read for a long time. In fact, I originally purchased the paperback in 2006 and never got around to reading it. The interesting part is that the book is still very much relevant today and is not dated in the least. Well now maybe some of the engines and middleware have this stuff built in, but the fundamentals I think I still important to understand. The book starts with a quick primer on math and physics. The basics are explained, like Cartesian coordinates, trigonometry, vectors, coordinate spaces, and some physics. Like most people reading a book of this level, the beginning was a light refresher. However, I’m a big stickler for reading books from cover to cover with no skipping around, so I did not mind a short recap. Next Buckland gets into state-driven design and demonstrates a simple command-line app using the concepts. I found this approach successful, and it was able to show the concepts without complex 2D or 3D math getting in the way. He followed up with autonomous moving agents, mostly based on steering behaviors. I was already somewhat familiar with steering behaviors, but I found the author’s description and code to be clear and concise and explained the concept better than I’ve seen before. He then applies the previous topics to a simple soccer game. This was a great next step, and really compiled the knowledge being taught into something concrete. In the next chapter, the author went into graphs; what they are, how to use them, and some popular algorithms link Dijkstra and A*. I always wanted to know what A* was, and this book explains it fairly well. Buckland then devotes a section to cover scripting languages and why they are useful. In this case, he chose Lua (not a bad choice) and explains some basics about the language, how to interface it with C++, and creates a simple finite state machine. This chapter is helpful even if you’re not coding AI and just need a scripting language for your game or engine (provided you like Lua). In fact, a lot of the concepts in this book are generic enough that they can be applied to multiple fields of interest for game developers. Next, the author creates a simple overhead game framework used in the subsequent examples. Using this framework he then shows practical path planning, goal driven agent behavior, and finishes up with fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic is another one of those buzzwords that always intrigued me but I never really understood. Buckland concludes with a quite excellent explanation of the concept. Overall I found this book to be stellar on all accounts. I feel that any game developer could gain insight from this text, even if they aren’t primarily working with AI programming. The scripting coverage could be used in many games, and the algorithms covered are generic enough to apply to different disciplines. While this is the first book I’ve read on AI, I really can’t imagine a better introduction. Highly recommended.

I thought this was a great book. Starts with simple concepts like state machines and works its way up. This examples in this book also helped me with structuring code in general. A great introduction to game AI that should get any indie developer up to speed with implementing most the common AI patterns. This is one of the books I use as reference as I work on my latest indie city building game, Pocket City.

The book save arrive and faster.This is why I need.thank you,you’re the best👍everything are awesome.very very recommended store.

Just for its chapter of fuzzy logic this volume deserves 5 stars. Besides that, the lessons learned on Finite-State-Machines and graphs are great and find applications outside the realm of video games. Definitely a must-have volunteer for every software developer.