Intelligent agents should steer clear from this book

Terrible and useless even for a book on AI for budding game developers. The theory and explanations in this book are sometimes decent but more often than not quite lacking. (es: in one of the first chapter the author uses Bresenham algorithm without taking the time to explain it). The use of tile based examples introduce unnecessary overhead, and the continuos attempts to introduce physics related code and references to the author's other book on game physics are just plain annoying. The range of subjects covered is very broad (chasing and evading, pathfinding, emergent behaviours, rule based reasoning, bayesian networks, neural networks, fuzzy logic, finite state machines, genetic algorithms), definitely too broad to treat each of these subject in decent depth and with clarity. Example code is of low quality and just superficially object-oriented. If you are looking for a decent introduction to game AI I recommend Matt Buckland "Programming Game AI by Example" and "AI Techniques for Game Programming".

Other Reviews

• Not bad, not superb.
• Just a few caveats
• Good for implementing AI in games, not so good for theory
• Intelligent agents should steer clear from this book
• Conceptually OK, terrible code & implementation