Amid all the hustle and bustle of the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this month, make sure you don't overlook one of the most intriguing tech topics being discussed at the show: how top devs are applying machine learning techniques to make better games.
For example, Naughty Dog technical art director Andrew Maximov is hosting a multi-day roundtable dedicated entirely to the art and business of machine learning in game dev.
Come by to engage with (or listen in on) the lively discussion about how deep learning based artificial intelligence is going to affect video game production in the years to come. A wide swathe of topics wll be covered, including the use of neural networks in game content generation, their value at runtime, and how you can integrate this technology into your creative process.
Also, Ubisoft Montreal animation researcher Daniel Holden will be delivering a presentation on "Character Control with Neural Networks and Machine Learning" that promises to be fascinating. Using state of the art research into character animation and recent prototypes developed at Ubisoft's La Forge, this talk will show how many different kinds of data-driven systems can vastly reduce the complexity and man-power involved in building an animation system, while simultaneously allowing for a larger variety of high quality and interesting motion to be produced.
As well as the numerous advantages, these approaches come with their own pitfalls and difficulties, many of which will also be covered in this practical and deep dive into machine learning for character animation.
And as part of the Community Management Summit, Showdown.cc's Alex Casassovici and Beatriz Miravete will be showing you how to apply machine learning techniques to community management in their talk on "How to Use Machine Learning, Live Telemetry Analysis, and Computer Vision to Manage Communities."
The pair will share what Showdown's technical team learned as they used machine learning, live telemetry analysis, and computer vision to truly understand player behaviors. They'll also connect these findings to academic research conducted on community psychology in an effor to teach you how to build solid community feedback loops in your games. You won't want to miss it!
For more details on these and all other announced talks head over to the online GDC 2018 Session Scheduler!
And of course, for more information about GDC 2018 visit the show's official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
