25 October 2007
Ferry

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune demo coming to PS3 Store mid-November. AI & Animation shown and explained

Christian Gyrling, the AI and Animation Programmer at developer Naughty Dog, talked about the AI and Animation in the PS3-exclusive Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on the official PlayStation blog. In the comments he mentions a demo is underway! To quote: “A demo will be available in the Play Station Store sometime mid November. I don’t know the exact date as of now.” The game was finished last week and the release date is November 20th in the USA & Canada, December 6th in Australia, and December 7th in Europe.

The game’s developers strive for realistic movement and fluidity as they create the animations for the game. In this video you get to take a Tech Dive into the Gameplay Animation.

As mentioned above, he explains how the AI and Animation were created. To quote:

“The final AI in Uncharted is simple, yet also very powerful. We are heavily utilizing the Cell architecture to allow the enemies to be more aware of their surroundings. On top of this, the AI is highly configurable to allow the designers to create custom behaviors. Examples of this are combat distance used for close-combat/ranged enemies, likelihood of moving and reaction times, grenade throwing and shooting styles. The goal was to make the AI ’seem’ smart. If we could do so without making the code complex, that would be great. The approach we took to this was to use animations to add variations to our characters instead of trying to programmatically add complex behaviors.

Halfway through development of Uncharted I sat down with the animator for the enemies (yes, only one animator) and played the game. We wanted to see what the player sees the enemies do the most because those would be the areas in which we wanted to focus our energy. We found that enemies getting hit and dying made up a large portion, and a fun one. Other areas were enemies entering combat, attacking from cover positions and, what we call, open combat - enemies standing in the open shooting at you.

Knowing this, we went to work. We wanted to give the player a rich experience by being selective in which areas to add variety. I’m pleased to say that the main enemies, pirates and mercenaries, have hundreds of animation variations in these areas. All of this makes the game experience richer and avoids repetition.

This, together with endless hours of fine tuning, resulted in the smooth and believable characters in Uncharted.” — Via PlayStation Blog