Dealing with Destruction: AI From the Trenches of Company of Heroes

Speakers: Chris Jurney, Shelby Hubick

Track: Programming

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: Intermediate

Description: Many next generation games include environmental destruction, but few games do it on the scale of Company of Heroes. Having an environment where every object is destroyable presents difficult challenges for AI characters. Company of Heroes achieves very complex unit and squad behavior despite having to deal with a constantly changing environment. This talk will give a look under the hood at the design and implementation of all the systems we used to achieve those goals. Soldiers in Company of Heroes look and act smart - they move in squads, use environmental objects for cover, move out of the way of oncoming vehicles, and react to major game events like explosions and suppressing fire. They do all this while maintaining smooth animation. At this talk we'll cover in detail the low-level techniques used to achieve these results.

Specific topics include: pathfinding in a changing environment, dealing with widely different movement capabilities, advanced turning behavior (3-pt turns, turn smoothing, turn optimizing search), right of way, and animation control of characters. Also covered will be squad level topics such as complex formation movement with environmental awareness, creating and searching for cover, and data driven battle planning. Demos will include an explanation of how we debugged all this complex behavior in a continuously changing environment.

Idea Takeaway: Attendees will learn how an award winning RTS evolved their AI and have enough detail to carry the implementation back to their own games. The techniques were originally developed in an RTS, but apply to any game with similar character requirements.

Intended Audience: Anyone looking to get an inside view of a complete AI implementation from a AAA title. Understanding of basic AI techniques such as A* is recommended.