Since early 2007 the SCEA Developer Support Group has made huge leaps in seeding premier developers in the Latin American region with hardware and support for PlayStation 2 and PSP (PlayStation Portable). Our presence at SBGames 2007 generated a lot of enthusiasm with the local developer community. This presentation will address an update regarding our efforts with Incubation and Academia for the whole region.

Biografia / biography:

Bruno Matzdorf has supported console developers for the past 12 years working for companies like Metrowerks (CodeWarrior), Criterion Software (RenderWare), and currently with Sony Computer Entertainment America (PlayStation). Currently, Bruno is helping SCEA find and foster development talent for all of the PlayStation family platforms. This effort includes the development community in Latin America.

Chris Norden has been designing, programming, and producing games professionally for almost 15 years. Having worked at major companies such as Origin Systems, Looking Glass Technologies, Ion Storm, and Aspyr Media, as well as starting several of his own companies, Chris has attained a broad level of technical knowledge and business experience that is a rare combination in this industry. Chris is now working at Sony Computer Entertainment America as a Senior Staff Developer Support Engineer to help developers around the world achieve their dreams with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable gaming systems.

Michael has been working in the video game industry for 18 years.  For the past 13 years he has been with Sony Computer Entertainment America (PlayStation).  During that time, he has worked with numerous developers on all platforms in the PlayStation family, analyzing game design to insure the best possible quality of game, given the developers available resources.  Michael is also part of an initiative to bring support to the development community in Latin America.

Autonomous non-player virtual characters in commercial video-games are rather dumb; they usually only execute some simple scripts, and have at best some autonomous spatial orientation. Human-like communication with a NPC is still technologically out of reach. It is not possible, for instance, to talk to a computer controlled NPC in a natural way.

Virtual Actors are something in-between dumb NPCs and (non-existent) super-intelligent Virtual Humans. Virtual Actors are specialized virtual characters that are made for playing roles, in the fashion of real actors. The talk will introduce into the research and challenges related to Virtual Actors, and will provide an overview of opportunities that arise with the development of Virtual Actors, for instance opportunities to create new kinds of games, including therapeutic and serious games.

Resumo:

NPCs (Non-Player Characters) autônomos, em videojogos comerciais, são bastante estúpidos; normalmente, executam somente um script simples, e tem talvez ainda alguma orientação espacial autônoma. Tecnicamente, ainda é impossível comunicar com um NPC de forma natural. Por exemplo, é impossível manter uma conversa com um NPC, se este estiver sendo controlado pelo computador.

Um Ator Virtual é algo que se encontra entre um NPC estúpido, e um Ser Humano Virtual super-inteligente (que ainda não existe). Atores virtuais são personagens virtuais especializados que são feitos para fazer um papel dramático, semelhante a um ator real. A apresentação vai introduzir a pesquisa e desafios relacionados com Atores Virtuais, e vai dar uma visão global das oportunidades que o desenvolvimento de Atores Virtuais oferece, para novos tipos de jogos, inclusive para jogos terapêuticos e "serious games".

Biografia / biography: em breve

During the next decade, the two fields of AI and online gaming will advance together for mutual benefit, via an increasing focus on NPC's that learn and adapt. Today most game AI is still relatively unsophisticated, even in MMOG's backed up by impressive server farms. Middleware firms like Kynogon and AI-Implant have sought to rectify this issue, but their offerings are still weak in key areas, such as learning, strategic planning and language processing. There exist many opportunities to use ideas from the AI research frontier to enhance game AI, and in this way to more greatly diversify the nature of online gameplay. On the AI side, it has long been recognized that the most natural path to creating AI systems with advanced intelligence is to embody these systems so that they can experience the same sort of fusion of sensation, action, cognition and socialization as humans do. Embodying AI systems in NPC's presents an alternative to robotics for AI embodiment, and one with several advantages, including lower cost of development, greater commercial viability, and the availability of a large and eager audience of humans to interact with and (implicitly and explicitly) teach the AI's. By designing games in which the learning and adaptation of the AI-controlled NPC's is part of the gameplay, we can simultaneously create more interesting and compelling games, and more advanced AI's. As an example of this approach, the virtual pet genre will be discussed in detail, and examples of AI-powered virtual pets with flexible learning and linguistic capability will be demonstrated, drawing on the speaker's own recent work creating intelligent NPC's for the the Multiverse game environment.