Artificial Intelligence & Games

Book excerpt: As has been pointed out by several industrial game AI developers the lack of behavioral modularity across games and in-game tasks is detrimental for the development of high quality AI [605, 171]. An increasingly popular method for ad-hoc behavior authoring that eliminates the modularity limitations of FSMs and BTs is the utility-based AI approach which can be used for the design of control and decision making systems in games [425, 557]. Following this approach, instances in the game get assigned a particular utility function that gives a value for the importance of the particular instance [10, 169]. For instance, the importance of an enemy being present at a particular distance or the importance of an agent’s health being low in this particular context. Given the set of all utilities available to an agent and all the options it has, utility-based AI decides which is the most important option it should consider at this moment [426]. The utility-based approach is grounded in the utility theory of economics and is based on utility function design. The approach is similar to the design of membership functions in a fuzzy set. A utility can measure anything from observable objective data (e.g., enemy health) to subjective notions such as emotions, mood and threat. The various utilities about possible actions or decisions can be aggregated into linear or non-linear formulas and guide the agent to take decisions based on the aggregated utility. The utility values can be checked every n frames of the game. So while FSMs and BTs would examine one decision at a time, utility-based AI architectures