Computer games represent a vast number of artificial intelligence routines, and many people are attracted to the video games industry as the ultimate creative and technical software challenge.  While the computer game industry is very competitive and as such most of the technical development experience doesn’t make it into the public domain, occasionally people like to give something back to help out others.

There are a number of online resources for this, including GamaSutra (the art of making games), AIGameDev (run by Alex, a very chilled and wise guy), AI Wisdom and others, the games industry does have a regular magazine called, obviously, Game Developer.

In order to get a picture of the state of the art in Game Development, a quick review of the last few years Game Developer magazines, looking for articles relating to Procedurally Generated Content or Virtual Agents.

  • December 2004, page 40, optimizing pathfinding at low levels
  • June 2006, page 30, blob physics
  • December 2007, page 16, Multi User Dungeons & MMO’s
  • Feb 2008, page 16, creating waves in game
  • March 2008, page 32 – MapZone, creating procedural textures
  • April 2008, Page 36, Intelligent Mistakes, AI
  • September 2008, page 48, Game economies
  • March 2009, page 14 – Using particle systems for terrain modeling.  Basic concept is like comets hitting the earth
  • June/July 2009, page 14 – Procedurally Generated Content in space games
  • August 2009, Page 40 – Procedurally Generated flowers
  • September 2009, page 7, building worlds with voxels (3d pixels)
  •  Feb 2010, Page 40, Procedurally Generated Content
  •  Feb 2010, page 48, Procedurally Generated plants, trees and models
  •  August 2010, Page 8, how to build social games
  •  January 2011, Page 48, techniques for better AI
  •  Feb 2011, page 24, interview about Minecraft, a breathtaking use of procedurally created worlds
  •  April 2011, page 21 – Procedurally Generated Content with Minecraft and perlin noise
  •  Career Guide Fall 2011, page 12 – Useful path finding techniques
  •  August 2011, page 6 – random generation of structures

Apologies for not putting in any more context, however if you’re interested then you’ll know where to go to find out more…