Notes

Introductions

This session is not a full post mortem of Halo

we're not exactly sure how it got billed that way, but we apologize if that was what you were expecting

This session is a discussion of Halo's AI targeted at Designers and AI Programmers

It will also be useful to anyone looking for insight into how to get past Level 3 on the hardest difficultly level

Today we are going to talk about:

The Initial design goals for Halo's AI

how they changed over the course of the project

Our AI implementation, including the technical constraints and important framework elements

as well as how the level creation process emerged from that implementation

And at the end of the talk we'll give a demonstration of our production tools

and try to show how all these ideas translated into what the player experiences

Before we start I want to point out that the title of this talk is "The Illusion of Intelligence" and not "The Reality of Intelligence"

If you came here for tips about how to make the enemies in your game intelligent, we don't have any for you

we don't know how to do that, but it sounds really hard

What we do have, though, is tips on how to make the enemies in your game _appear_ to be intelligent

Chris and I have lots of experience with pretending to be intelligent