Cutting-Edge Game AI from Industry Experts! AI Game Programming Wisdom 2, the second volume in this cutting-edge series, is packed with all new tricks, techniques, algorithms, architectures, and philosophies—all written by industry experts! The wealth of knowledge and expertise in this volume is sure to surpass your expectations. As with the first volume, this book is designed to provide practical advice for building state-of-the-art game AI for commercial games; however, it also strives to help you look forward to leading-edge techniques that will be critical in future explorations. AI Game Programming Wisdom 2 provides advances, discoveries, and triumphs that will influence and drive game AI for the next decade. The breadth of experience and diverse backgrounds of the authors make this a truly global, cross-sectional resource for game AI. The book is divided into twelve comprehensive sections, including an all new speech recognition and dialogue section. There is also coverage of a wider variety of game genres and a cumulative index is included for easy cross referencing between volumes. This new volume alone is an indispensable tool, but together with volume 1, these books form a remarkable collection that no game AI programmer should be without! SECTIONS: * General Wisdom * Pathfinding and Movement * Group Movement, Tactics, and Planning * AI Animation Control * State Machines * Architecture * FPS, RTS, and Strategy AI * Racing and Sports AI * Scripting * Learning * Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks * Speech Recognition and Dialogue On the CD-ROM (WINDOWS): Includes source code and demos to augment the articles, as well as tutorials, Web resources, complementary articles, and color images. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Intel Pentium-series, AMD Athlon or newer processor recom-mended. Windows 98 or higher required, 3D graphics card recommended for optimal performance, and DirectX 9 or higher. Code and demos were tested on a Pentium 4 2.5 GHz (1GB) machine with a GeForce 3 graphics card, WinXP with DirectX 9, and Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. CONTRIBUTORS Greg Alt Mat Buckland Phil Carlisle Alex J. Champandard Emmanuel Chiva Alex Darby Julien Devade Mike Dickheiser Kevin Dill Jean-Yves Donnart Penny Drennan Eric Dybsand Euan Forrester James Freeman-Hargis Dan Fu Benjamin Geisler Mario Grimani Sebastian Grinke Harri Hakonen Chris Hargrove Alexander Herz Ryan Houlette Geraint Johnson Soren Johnson Timo Kaukoranta Tom Kent Sandeep Kharkar Kristin King Neil Kirby Brett Laming François Dominic Laramée Lars Lidén John Manslow Stéphane Maruéjouls James Matthews Alex McLean Syrus Mesdaghi Jeff Orkin Nick Porcino Steve Rabin Michael Ramsey Christopher Reed John Reynolds Gilberto Rosado Shawn Shoemaker Jouni Smed P.J. Snavely Alex Sramek Penny Sweetser Dale Thomas Paul Tozour William van der Sterren Neil Wallace Terry Wellmann Steven Woodcock Eric Yiskis