Questions from GDC

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    • Questions from GDC

      Here are some questions I had from GDC. I figured it would be better to create a single thread for them instead of four separate threads.

      1) Is Design Patterns a useful book to read? This got brought up in a career seminar panel and two of the panelists were divided regarding its current worth.

      2) Organizations to join related to AI Game programmers or game programming in general? I know IGDA and AI Game Programmers Guild (though you must be in the industry to be a member of this one). Are there any others I should look into?

      3) Are the AI Game Programming Wisdom books and Game Programming Gems series useful despite their age? It looks like AI Game Programming Wisdom 4 is out of print and like $400 on Amazon so perhaps not that one.

      4) If I'm interested in AI game programming should I still create my own simple engine/expand GCC engine or just use an engine already out there to make games for a portfolio?

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Trinak ().

    • RE: Questions from GDC

      Originally posted by Trinak
      1) Is Design Patterns a useful book to read? This got brought up in a career seminar panel and two of the panelists were divided regarding its current worth.

      Wow, really? Who said it wasn't useful? Design Patterns are critical to the long-term success of a code base. The book itself is a bit dated and dry, and maybe that was their point, but utilizing various design patterns (strategy, state, factory, decorator, etc.) are incredibly important. At this point, if I say "decorator", I expect an engineer to know exactly what I'm talking about as if I had said "pixel".


      2) Organizations to join related to AI Game programmers or game programming in general? I know IGDA and AI Game Programmers Guild (though you must be in the industry to be a member of this one). Are there any others I should look into?

      Where are you from? IGDA is probably your best bet. The problem is that for every professional developer, there are about 10,000 amateur developers, many of whom speak with authority on subjects that they actually don't know anything about. That's a big part of why Game Coding Complete exists; Mike felt that there needed to be a book out there written by someone who actually made professional games.

      There are groups that are similar to the AI Game Programmer's Guild, but most of them are invite-only and have requirements. In order to get into the AI Game Programmer's Guild, you must have made a significant contribution to the AI of a shipped game. This gives us a VERY good signal-to-noise ratio which would be lost if we opened it up to the public.

      So what you end up getting are two types of groups: One is full of amateur developers teaching other amateur developers (the blind leading the blind) and the other is for professionals who try to keep out amateurs. It's not that we really want to keep you out of our clubs, but who do I ask when I have a question? If I posted an AI question to a typical game dev forum, I would either get useless information or nothing at all. If I post to the AI Game Programmer's Guild, I'll get several great pieces of information by people who have done it before. If we allowed anyone in, we'd have thousands of members posting dozens of things every day. It would be hard to filter out the "what's a decision tree?" question and eventually I'd ignore it.

      This board is special. It's run by two professionals who really care about bridging that gap and it's small enough that we can both weigh in on the vast majority of questions. We're trying to create that missing resource.


      3) Are the AI Game Programming Wisdom books and Game Programming Gems series useful despite their age? It looks like AI Game Programming Wisdom 4 is out of print and like $400 on Amazon so perhaps not that one.

      Yes, they are. I still refer to them, even stuff way back in Game Programming Gems. The graphics stuff is much less useful as time goes on, by Game Programming Gems and AI Game Programming Wisdom is.

      Also, shameless plug: There's a new AI Wisdom book coming out later this year called Game AI Pro:
      amazon.com/Game-AI-Pro-Collected-Professionals/dp/1466565969

      I have two articles in this book, one about background AI and the other as an introduction to Utility Theory, which I touch on in the AI chapter of GCC.


      4) If I'm interested in AI game programming should I still create my own simple engine/expand GCC engine or just use an engine already out there to make games for a portfolio?

      Maybe. There are two schools of thought on this. Personally, I think it's good to have the experience of creating an engine, but it's not representative of working in the industry.

      Honestly, I would just use a simple 2D engine like SDL or PyGame. Expanding GCC is another way to go, or even Unity. Choose an engine that lets you get the game up and running with some objects in a very short amount of time. That lets you concentrate on the AI behavior.

      -Rez
    • Thanks for the responses and sorry for the late reply. Been out of town.

      originally posted by Rezination
      Wow, really? Who said it wasn't useful?


      It was from the Ask the Experts panel on Friday. If I remember correctly it was Mike Acton. Also, he didn't directly say that it wasn't useful. When a question came up regarding useful books to read, one panelist mentioned it and he disagreed. Unfortunately time was either out or quickly running out and so he was not allowed to elaborate further as to why.

      Where are you from?


      I'm from San Diego so luckily there is a local IGDA chapter that I'll be looking into joining.

      Also, shameless plug: There's a new AI Wisdom book coming out later this year called Game AI Pro:


      That book was also mentioned at GDC and added to my ever growing list of books to read.

      Honestly, I would just use a simple 2D engine like SDL or PyGame.


      That will certainly make things easier. When I started trying to make a game I did so from scratch. While it has been useful to learn about DirectX, game engine systems, and other things that have come up while doing this, I think I'd feel better about things if I had actually just created a simple game with an engine so I'd have something complete to show.
    • Finishing a game is the most important thing you can do for your career in the games industry.

      -Rez