Hi all, I was wanting to know if any major game studio outsources its GameAI to independent developers. By outsourcing, I mean bringing into their development team people who are experts in the AI domain. I understand that AI usually takes a backseat to say the graphics in a game, but it still would make sense to devote considerable time and effort to incorporate an exceptional AI component for a game, wouldn't it? And if a there was someone who provided this service to the studio, I think they might just take it (it wud be better than hiring an AI programmer on a contractual basis atleast). This set of people may have the experience in building robust AI and more importantly, integrating it into a given game. And yes, roughly what proportion of the total budget in a game is actually devoted to AI, lets say for a 1st person action shooter, where opponent AI will most certainly make a difference to the gaming experience? And are there already such 'AI providers'?? thanks...

I don't think that would be very practical, given how tightly coupled most game engines are. But I have heard of people bringing in external contractors to work on AI. To do it effectively I think would require the developer to be in the studio with the other programmers and designers on hand. After all, AI as a subsystem is often just as much a design issue as a programming issue, unlike rendering, networking, physics, input, etc.

Not that I know of. AI is _highly_ intertwined with design and you need lots of face-to-face engineer-designer time. It's not something that I can see being outsourced.

Now, certainly there are plenty of publishers using 3rd party AI Libraries, but I'm pretty sure they always have an in house engineer.

-me

I think William van der Sterren (he posts here, can't remember his exact username, should be something like wvandersterren... hopefully he'll read this thread and correct me) first contract with Guerilla was to work as a consultant to improve their AI... some sort of R&D consultant. I might be wrong though, but anyway, check out his webpage and contact him in case you want to know more about what he did.

Cheers

Eric