How important is animation in AI, and do you and Steve Bender just hate each other yet?

Me and Steve are great, because I think we also used to work together. I mean, on Crysis we worked together already. Animation is a fundamental part. Animation and communication, dialogues, those are what really make AI stand out. For me, there are a lot of examples of good AI. One classic one is, of course, F.E.A.R., where if you think about how they implemented this, the technology itself doesn't have to be rocket science sometimes to give you the feeling that those things are very smart. There was a lot of really smart crafting of the environment, smart setups by the level designers. So this is why I was saying the AI is the product of the collaboration of lots of departments. To make it look good and make it look believable, what we work on a lot with Steve, for example, is that he is the person in charge of all this look. So whenever we do previews, we always work on iterations, white box phases and keyframe animation, where what we work on a lot is trying to iterate through the gameplay, because one thing is looking good, and another thing is looking good for the gameplay, because we're not making a movie. So sometimes you might create an animation that looks perfect, but then when the player plays in a certain way, you don't even see it, or it's not reacting correctly, as you say. You cannot blend correctly, or you cannot transition from one place to another. Reactions are a really important scenario where you need to have a balance between the amount of animation you want to create to get the believability, but also structuring them in a way in which it's easier to transition from one to another, so that the categories that you want to play make sense for what you're trying to communicate to the player, and use the different types of techniques that we have.

So basically, the way I grew my skills in my career is that the behavior is critical; it's the central part for the AI to describe the decision flow. Then the decision flow needs to go into making sure that it shows what the animation director wants to show. And this is where I think it always seems so complicated when we talk about stuff, but really, you're trying to solve a complex problem. The complexity needs to be somewhere. And I think the critical bit is making sure that the complex parts are distributed over the ownership of different departments. So for example, the animation director describes the flow, describes the animation state machine that you want to create, how to transition from one state into another, what is allowed to be done. And then the decision flow needs to explain what the AI wants to do, without tying those two things together too much, because you want to have these things flowing nicely. And yeah, so me and Steve work a lot together. He's fantastic. His experience is absolutely great for us, all the things we always discuss and always want to push. Hi, Steve.