Hi all, Im a newbie to AI in games. I am interested in the following and it would be great if you could provide me with the latest in the field. Some links would also be helpful 1) AI for cooperation in team based games 2) AI for adjusting difficulty in games Thanks Aswin

For game type I have games like football, army strategy games and group based first person shooters.

I would like to know how enemies could adapt the difficulty based on user skills, how to generate interesting behaviors like hiding, duck etc. and taking advantage of the fact that NPCs know human player location.

For team cooperation I would like to know the different means by which NPCs playing with us could show intelligent behaviors; so as to make the game interesting. For example, learn strategies for the human player to cooperatively complete a specific task.

Make "Team"s. A team contains the units inside the team, the task of the team, and some information about their task. Then, every unit in the team must know its own task, and the needed informations about the task. And then, they "just" have to behave according to their class.

I've thought about cooperative in RTS Games and I've found it's somehow poor there where the level of communication between AI and human partner player is not enough for winning a game. Example: in Warcraft 3 if you are playing with AI partner the only thing it do duo to cooperation is just telling you that it'll attack the following area!
What about making AI partner able to communicate with partner player and they are able to determine plans together? What about thinking more in strategic level cooperation? I've played many RTS games but I've not found any of these games achieve this feature

For latest research most of them are in RTS Games:-
1) I've found a paper under title "Player Adaptive Cooperative Artificial Intelligence for RTS Games"
2) MIT was asking for researches in the area of cooperative:
"8/8/2008
Fall 2008
UROP Department/Lab/Center: Humans & Automation Laboratory
Faculty Supervisor: Prof. M.L. Cummings

Supervisory Teams of Unmanned Vehicles

The Humans and Automation Lab (http://halab.mit.edu) is currently developing a game-like simulation environment similar to popular real-time strategy (RTS) games such as Starcraft or Ages of Empires. Our focus is to study the ways in which teams of operators, each controlling multiple unmanned vehicles, collaborate and coordinate to achieve a common set of goals. During the course of this UROP position, the task is to modify the engine of an existing single-operator game environment (coded in Java) in order to allow multiple operators to supervise vehicles and collaborate with each other. In particular, the focus of this position would be on socket programming in order to synchronize multiple interfaces and allow communication between different players. Other tasks may include database logging for user interactions and updating game mechanics. This project will be performed in the Humans and Automation Lab (http://halab.mit.edu), under the faculty supervision of Prof. M. L. Cummings. This UROP position is a sponsor paid position, $15/h, available now.

Requirements: Must have: Strong background in Java coding Self-motivated Nice to have: Knowledge of networking protocols (TCP/IP and UDP) Experience in video game development.

Contact: Brian Mekdeci (mekdeci@mit.edu)"

[Edited by - ZiKaS on October 13, 2009 3:33:02 PM]

For Team cooperation I suggest searching for papers by William van der Sterren.
There are a couple of articles in AI Programming Wisdom but check his webpage http://www.cgf-ai.com/

Hi all,
Thank you for your generous replies. Its a pity there are very few games that have AI bots that cooperate with the user. Yes, left4dead is a good example. The players heal and cover your back.