Preface

Time goes by at an incredible speed - we already have our third year behind us! 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.

We had originally planned to be ready with the first interfaces for this year's GDC. However, it's a larger task than we thought, and you need to be a little bit more patient with us. I should be more cautious when handing out ETAs :-)

The number of committee members has increased from 69 last year to 74 at the present time. 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. As a specific membership category, we have introduced "consultants" now. These "consultants" are expected to review and give feedback on documents that their working group has created, but do not play an active role in the creation of the documents. There is a support team as well, mostly composed of students, who continue to 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.

Again, members' posting in our forums at SourceForge has slowed down to slightly more than 500 messages for the last year. This is partly because working groups like the one on rule-based systems now proceed mostly by an e-mail list, but it is clear that we need to push activity ahead for some groups. This is especially true for the groups on FSM and steering (see this report's section on these groups). On the other hand, groups like the one on goal-oriented action planning have made great progress and are quite close to actual interface specifications.

The new format for our yearly GDC roundtable on AI Interface Standards, where we present our findings and discuss them with the game developer community, worked out very well. Because of the limited time at the roundtable, we focused on a subset of groups this year - those that made the most progress - instead of an overall coverage. Even with this limited set of groups, it was of course too little time to go through and discuss the groups' material in detail, but I think we were able to cover a good amount of issues. You can read more about the GDC session by following the link above.

One thing that we definitely must improve next year is the communication between the groups. For example, as you can read in the world interfacing group's section, some issues there are not compatible with the direction of the rest of the groups.

By the way - please note that we mostly describe only updates on our work in the following report, so feel free to check the ones of the previous years!

Alexander Nareyek
(Committee Chairman)

June 17, 2005
Düsseldorf, Germany