Preface

This is a report of the second year of our committee on standards for artificial intelligence interfaces (AIISC). The committee was launched on June 17, 2002 within the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). The committee's goals are to provide and promote interfaces for basic AI functionality, enabling code recycling and outsourcing thereby, and freeing programmers from low-level AI programming as to assign more resources to sophisticated AI. Standards in this area may also lay grounds for AI hardware components in the long run.

The pace of posting on the SourceForge forums (our work is coordinated via a project page at SourceForge) has slowed down this year, resulting in a total of 1067 posts compared to 1777 last year, but some working groups have established sub-groups, which mostly communicate by e-mail. The number of committee members has slightly increased, and we have 69 members now. Interestingly enough, this year saw the first hardware company joining the committee, dedicated to provide specialized hardware for AI techniques like pathfinding. The committee's members are assigned to working groups, which work on the following topics: World Interfacing, Steering, Pathfinding, Finite State Machines, Rule-based Systems and Goal-oriented Action Planning. There is a support team as well, mostly composed of students, which do a great job in supporting the working groups with summaries, documentation and so on. Overviews of the work of all these units during the last year can be found in the following sections.

Our yearly GDC roundtable on AI Interface Standards turned out to be great again, and we see a continuously growing perception of the need for game AI interface standards among game developers. Again, we got some very useful feedback from the roundtable's audience. Our projection of what we wanted to achieve until GDC - a first draft of our standards - was, however, too optimistic as it turned out. We will try to get it ready until next GDC, but realistically, some groups advance toward this goal faster than others, and we might not be able to cover drafts for every group. The time that we have at GDC is highly limited, and we will most likely focus on a subset of groups in the presentation for next year anyway because many participants mentioned that they felt that there was not enough time for the huge volume of information.

Finally, if you are interested in joining the committee, we would be happy to receive your application. Please follow our membership application information on the internet: http://www.igda.org/ai/

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to our committee's progress and this report. The committee is based on voluntary work and we would be nothing without the altruistic support of our members and coordinators! Given the outrageous regular workload in jobs of the game industry, this can hardly be appreciated enough.

See you at GDC 2005!

Alexander Nareyek
(Committee Chairman)

June 17, 2004
Cork, Ireland