AISeek and Torque?

#1 Wow, thanks for pointing this out, I'd never seen it before. I might just end up getting a license for that!

Edit->Nevermind, look at the price (in a newer post)

Edit2->
For those who don't want to read the thread to find the prices:
AIseek: Non-Commercial: Unknown; Commercial: $40,000; Indie: $10,000*;
SpirOps: Non-Commercial: Free!; Commercial: 35,000**; Indie: Unknown;

* $2000 to upgrade each year
** Euro -- The forum eats the sign

#2 Very interesting indeed! I remember a blog post of some GG employee mentioning "good news coming soon regarding AIseek" [long]time ago, but never read anything else until now.

#3 Sweet! Who knew...

It looks like they have some middleware for AI, which I think we are all interested in.

Quote:
The Intia SDK provides out-of-the box integration with other leading middleware solutions, including:

PhysX (NVIDIA)

Torque (Garage Games)

HeroEngine (Simutronics)

Gamebryo (Emergent) - integration under development

Intia's integration with physics engines is part of AIseek's strategy for supporting highly dynamic game worlds. World changes processed by the physics engine are automatically detected by Intia. Intia then recalculates the corresponding parts of the navigation graph on-the-fly, keep the game's AI continually up-to-date.

Sounds pretty cool!

But its also a sales pitch for a card, with some kindof integrated AI processing chip. Maybe they are hoping to get bought by Intel or Nvidia, because theres no way, ever, thats going to take off. They named their chip the Intia...

#4 Interesting, it's been a couple years since I've talked to anyone from AISeek, I think I should give them a ring again. I wonder if they're still planning on creating an AI card or if they're offloading that onto existing hardware now.

#5 I don't think that the AI card is necessary since they advertise multi processor support, but I could be wrong (I'll ask them in my next email). I've found out a few things about this:
1. It's pretty cool, try Youtubing "AISeek"
2. $40,000 without the Indie discount, and I've sent off an email asking what the discount is.

#6 I got a reply from them, and here's the answers:
* $10,000 for Indies, with $2000 to update each year
* About the AI Card

Quote:Is the AI processor necessary? *** GIL: No, the processor is optional. We have our a "development version" of our silicon running in-house, but we're not marketing it externally yet. The experience of Ageia underscores the importance of (1) bringing the best possible software to market first; (2) having it gain wide acceptance; and (3) taking full advantage of existing hardware platforms (multi-core CPUs, leading GPUs) before launching new hardware into the ecosystem. So that's the approach we're taking.

Seems like a smart approach. Have a good software version going, and once it's got a large audience, announce a card to make it even better.

#7 Thanks for the info Nathan!

Btw, its an important discount for indies, but still out of range of the majority I think... The demo its fully functional?

#8 It had sparked my interest in using it as a product as I am sure it would for quite a few others but with a $10000 price tag it's far beyond the price reach of myself and most other indie developers too...pity.

#9 Thank you, Nathan, for taking the time to research that! I was just hoping somebody would know.

It's a shame the price is so high. I think there are probably 100s if not 1000s of good game developers and programmers with outstanding ideas whose only fault is that they cannot afford decent AI middleware. Espcially something like this that is compatible with the cheap, but very powerful, Torque Game Engine.

#10 It looked to me like their selling point was "efficient pathfinding in dynamic environments". I doubt that's something required by most indy game titles.

Which brings up the question...

If there was an affordable AI Solution for Torque, what features would you want?

#11 Most folks i think have 3 ideas of Ai, the ai you seen im common rpg, that have a respawn and a selection of preset behaviours. and the other is the shooter ai that spawn once and attack, seek cover and defend themselves. The last is the general population ai with a large number of ai to populate a scene or to be able to interact with. Unfortunatly we have a few of each running around. The aiguard does a good attack behaviour, but its as dumb as a brick, becuase of its range. The KillerKork is nice, but Its just one or 2 behaviours and again not very dynamic. Being able to place a ai and then select a behaviour type would be a awesome thing for any basic torque. Sure keep the aiplayer setup for everything, but having the ability to play AI per mission, and not be default forcing a player every time they want to get any ai, they have to do to a ai resource. since the current ai is just a pathed and its reoccurring every mission. Spawners would be a standard of ai, even if they were still pathed, the ability to place and a AI entity and not have my console tell me that you dont have the other paths in that mission (becuase i dont want that ai to show up). Its small things like that. that should be standard. But this is a old conversation. Folks want real ai, which as we can see profession Ai is 10k to buy, or there is the immersion ai its free, but its a bit high on the complexity scale. Then again. AI is probably the hardest part of any game. Imo.

The demos look really good for this AISEEK system.

personally if someone would create a clean resource for the immersive AI system and clean up the behaviours and spawning system. It would really be very much like this system, if i read it right.

#12 I've heard that AI.Implant was really good, and I've read that it was free. I sent an email to them to see if that was true, but I haven't heard back from them yet... I've also sent out an email to Kynogon to see how much their Kynapse AI system is, but I haven't heard back from them either, but I was able to download some real-time demos, and it looks pretty good.

@William: No problem, I was wondering if I could afford it, so I just put the information I got from that here.

#13 @ Nathan

I honestly don't know how much I can tell you about the pricing of Kynapse, due to NDA, but it ain't cheap.

#14 Yea, I'm sure it isn't! But might as well stick the prices of the other AI solutions on this thread too.

#15 I think Edward has hit the nail on the head.

It appeared as if the AISeek engine allowed me to supply coded behaviors that modeled internal behavior, external interactions, and goals. Their website makes it sound like there are helper functions to facilitate this (behaviors for field-of-view, avoidance, pathing, etc.). Once all of the behaviors are coded, it seems (and I'm making a rather generous assumption) that the AISeek engine would then control all aspects of the A.I.

That, to me, would be an excellent way to incorporate A.I. into a game and would be what I wanted.

#16 James - It's a feature I've been researching and devouring information on recently including your AI post mortem from Be the Dinosaur which led my to purchase Programming Game AI by Example by Mat Buckland - a good read so ta for that recommendation.

I was interested in the AI pack that was under development a couple of years back by Phil Carlisle, Stefan and Justin Matte and I've emailed them a couple of weeks back to enquire whether there is any plan to complete or if they'd share the source on where ever they got to but I've had no responses back.

ImmersiveAI is a very good basis but there are few pitfalls/problems and missing elements (i.e. navmesh generation for interiors) that need some work.

There are other resources for A* Path finding, etc but they're all snippets rather than a solidly implemented complete system i.e. Goal/state based, Genetic Algorhythms, time sliced path finding, a* star and path smoothing... all that kind of stuff. Lots of fragments around.

I got together a few guys before to look at developing an AI pack for TGE/TGEA but it was around the time that the dreamRpg licensing debacle was going on and it left a sour taste - the majority of guys felt unwilling to spend that amount of time developing a pack that they quite possibly wouldn't be allowed to sell (much grumbling about artists allowed to sell what they like) so it never got started.

I'm willing to work with anyone in community if anyone has the desire to work on putting together a solid AI system/pack - whether that be based on current resource i.e. ImmersiveAi or whether we build from the ground up.

#17 I have gotten a reply from SPIROPS, but I still don't know the price for an indie license (I have to wait ten days, due to vacations). I might not be able to post it though, since it sounds like they want me to sign a NDA.

Edit-> Added link.

#18 Ugh, the dreaded NDA. God forbid that your pricing becoming public knowledge. I'd be easily able to compete against their product if I only knew their price! *HEHE!*

#19 More updates, and this one is cool! The wording is a little confusing, but the company is french, so I'm assuming english is a second language:

Quote:
we will gladly provide a free copy of SpirOps for the Torque community. Could you find a way for us to get some money if a project is edited? royalties or fixed fee or anything you might imagine...

Edit-> Note: I did not ask about that. I think it may have formed when I said that people here would also like to know the price.

There's also this:

Quote:
As long as the project is not a commercial one, we provide SpirOps for free. We charge only the support, depending on your needs.

And from the email after that:

Quote:
The main point is that we do not want to stop people doing great AI for their project (game, simulation or wathever), so it is free as long as it is not a commercial project. But if your project become or is a commercial one, we want a part of the cake ;-), so no problem to upgrade a non commercial project for a commercial one (probably when you will get edited and your game will be sold), the terms are still to be defined...
Concerning the support, it is optional. The paiement is based on a quarter basis, so you can pay a quarter to get started, and then stop it. The important point for us is to be kept informed of the evolution of your project. We could also collaborate on making tutorials on your project and or use it as a demonstration if you agree.

Still don't know the price, but I hope to figure it out soon!

#20 Very good news indeed! Well done Nathan, thanks again!