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Abstract

Abstract on the theme of graduation work

Content

Introduction

As the gaming industry is gaining momentum in development, gaming technologies are becoming more accessible to the public. In this regard, there is a need to identify the positive impact of games on the main audience. Due to age-related psychological and pedagogical features, a contingent that is most dependent on games (for example, adolescents) may appear.

In the theory of game behavior, computer games or their other types do not stand out as an independent phenomenon, since this phenomenon does not have a long history. These games are free activities, to which a person turns at his own request. The game process occurs subject to the availability of the necessary equipment (smartphone, PC, game console).

It is worth noting that the information industry has a huge impact on the gaming industry, without which jumps in productivity, quality, visual component and other integral attributes of modern games are not possible.

Many games involve not only solving logical problems, but also a certain emotional burden, which underlies most cases of pathological attachment to games.

1. Relevance of the topic

In the modern world, more and more people are interested in the gaming industry, namely, games. This aspect has a positive effect on the mutual development of information technology and games. It is not possible to develop one without interest from outside.

The main reasons for this development and a positive trend are that players constantly want developers to improve the quality of game projects, which entails a number of limitations, provided that the technology does not develop. So where more powerful processors are needed, there are enthusiasts who want to use them at full capacity to increase the project's productivity, and, as a result, its quality. Do not forget that in addition to processors, powerful video cards and fast RAM are required, and they will not be able to work efficiently without a motherboard corresponding to their level. Based on the foregoing, manufacturers of computer components are also involved in this process.

It is worth noting that high-quality and productive components are created not only for people who are interested in computer games, but also for those who create them or are engaged in any kind of creativity that requires specific equipment. Let's say that video editors need fast and powerful processors with equally efficient RAM.

As a result, it turns out that not only the gaming industry has a demand for high-quality components. For effective work, appropriate software is also needed.

2. The purpose and objectives of the study, expected results

The goal is to study the impact of information technology on the gaming industry.

During the work, popular technologies and equipment that is currently being used will be analyzed. An analysis will be made of how rapidly technology and software are developing and what impact this has on the gaming industry.

It is worth adding that not only software and components form modern computer or console game projects, but also artificial intelligence. This topic will also be touched upon and analyzed.

The result of the study will be the creation of a game project that can reflect all of the above.

3. History of the gaming industry

This item is very important for understanding how the gaming industry has developed and how information technology has developed along with it. This pattern can be traced throughout the period. From the creation of the first game to the present day.

3.1 Origins

The oldest stage in the formation of the gaming industry lasted from 47 to 61 years. It all started with the fact that in 1947, two inventors, Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Astle Ray Mann, have filed a patent for registering an entertainment device equipped with a CRT tube and buttons that allow you to aim the point of sight at the sketchy figures of aircraft. To display these figures on the screen, analog circuits were used in the patent scheme. And although the patent itself was registered at the end of 1948, the device never got into production, but at the same time it provided a “reference point” for electronic gaming machines.

Further history is a real vinaigrette of dates, persons and events that equally claim the “first computer game” and the first gaming PC. Among the largest games, we note the NIMROD university computer with the pseudo-game Nim, as well as the prototypes of the OXO, Tennis for Two, Mouse in the Maze, Tic-Tac-Toe and Spacewar games. All of them came out from 51 to 61 years old.

Perhaps the main of them should be considered Spacewar - the ancestor of all the games and the only commercially successful game that was released before the release of the legendary Pong. The game used an analog computer and an oscilloscope vector display connected to it. Unlike previous chess simulators and attempts to create games as part of student research, Spacewar focused on the commercial component.

Prior to Spacewar, the authors did not sell their own “utilities” and did not try to directly make money on them, because at that time computers were not as widespread and in demand as they are now. Spacewar came out in 61 and was, in fact, the amateur work of a group of scientists at the University of Massachusetts. At that time, the game served as an auxiliary program for the computer DEC PDP-1 and contributed to its sales, working as a modern “benchmark” - i.e. demonstrated the capabilities of a computer.

The gameplay was simple to the banal: they played two, each with its own boat, and in the center of the screen the Sun shone with its own gravitational field. The ships tried to destroy each other, and the inertia prescribed for the ships and unusual features of attraction to the star added interest. The Spacewar game has been reprinted several times and, as you can judge from the “future,” has become for its time the main inspiration for the first generation of game developers and publishers. At that time, the most quick-witted people realized that “you can make money on it” - the first sign marked the transition of obscure software applications to the status of a promising business.

The next step was the climb to the success of Ralph Baer and his prefix Magnavox Odyssey. This was the first console in history, and she was the representative of the first generation of game consoles. The prefix went on sale in 1972, although the prerequisites for its appearance were formed already in 1951 - it was then that the engineer and businessman Ralph Baer put forward the idea of "interactive television", that is, the ability to interact with what is happening on the TV screen.

Baer received the title of “Father of Video Games” for his services, and he developed a working concept for a gaming station in 66. The idea of making television broadcast interactive has earned him millions. The production of the Odyssey prefix was handled by the Magnavox company, which did not survive to this day, and the prefix itself had very unusual controllers. For control, boxes with levers were used that moved the squares on the screen horizontally and vertically. Each of the games was like an insert from a board game that stuck to the TV screen and created a playing field. The game was even positioned as a television “desktop”, simply because the term video game had not yet appeared.

Official support for the console ceased in less than three years - in the 75th, all Odyssey fans remained with a bunch of inserts (almost 30 games were released for the console) and by that time outdated fun. There was no sound at the console, and the figures of the players were projected onto the screen with the help of an antediluvian projector built into the console, because of which it was necessary to correctly position it in front of the television screen.

Magnavox lost its leader status due to its own greed - investors spared funds to release a modification that would add sound effects, and therefore the game in silence is barely whether she could remain the “crown of interactive entertainment." Atari took over the initiative.

Competitors drew attention to Odyssey and created on its basis another electronic game, which in its then success is equivalent to pinball. In 1972, Atari, a novice little-known company, launched an arcade machine with the Pong game. Well, the first Atari console against the backdrop of the sudden popularity of Pong was Atari Home Pong - a compact version of an arcade machine.

A logical feud broke out between Baer and Atari when, in the 74th, the “Father of Video Games” sued Atari and demanded to utilize all the Pong machines and pay him compensation for using the patented invention and clone of the “ping pong” game from Magnavox’s console. Atari CEO Nolan Bushnell managed to agree on the use of a license to trade video game consoles for $ 0.7 million, but other competitors, who appeared in the mid-70s, had a lot of trouble.

I must say that Pong has conquered the world through simplicity. In fact, this vertical tennis did not offer anything innovative, but people liked the simplicity inherent in such masterpieces as Arcanoid, Zuma or Tetris. Due to the fact that the registered patent for the use of the Pong trademark was not formulated clearly enough, Pong got a lot of imitators from other startup companies. Among the most famous were Bally Midway, Chicago Dynamics and Allied Leisure. The imitators released discounted and more affordable versions of Home Pong, without transferring funds to either Baer or Atari, and as a result, the market was oversaturated with the same type of unlicensed products.

The Pong clones were guilty of the 1977 crisis. This fateful year for the industry affected small companies, forcing manufacturers of outdated consoles and copycats Pong to stop all kinds of investment in this area. Some US manufacturers such as Fairchild, Magnavox and RCA were able to stay afloat, but others closed or sold off their assets for pennies. The promising RCA startup was especially unpleasant - at the beginning of the “lean” year, the company thoroughly invested in launching the RCA Studio II, which, although it was an interesting product at that time, was left without an active player base.

And the most accessible and popular console during this period was Coleco Telstar. The console sold for about $ 50, which made it the most cheap in the market. From 76 to 77, fourteen variants of this console came out, which gained popularity including thanks to Pong sports clones: tennis, hockey and handball.

In 1983, during the "game plague", a new star came up, which not everyone noticed, and, of course, not immediately. In Japan, the best-ever console version ever made its debut - Famicom. The full name of the console: Nintendo Family Computer, the most successful 8-bit third-generation console in history. An attractive price, convenient joysticks and a rapidly expanding library of games, including the Super Mario Bros series, helped to gain popularity. At least once, but played by everyone who lives in a house with a TV.

In 1985, this prefix helped the market recover from the crisis and literally rise from its knees. In the States, she appeared with more than a two-year delay, and it was in the USA that Famicom was much more popular than in her native Asia. For the English-speaking market, the console was renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System, the name under which the whole modern world knows it. It was this prefix that came first to Russia - the demand of Russian consumers on the console began with the Chinese NES fakes under the names “Dandy”, “Suybor”, Liko and others.

However, the Nintendo licensed console was sold in the United States, and for the entire US entertainment market, it has become as much a savior as the Space Invaders for the 77 year crisis. Moreover, Nintendo has since maintained its leading position in the digital entertainment markets of the United States and Japan, and is one of the modern three “platform holders” - companies that sell not only games, but also consoles for them around the world.

The prefix sales peaked in the New Year holidays and in the first weeks of '86, shortly after the launch of NES throughout the United States. Prior to the launch of this console, the main achievements of the Japanese company were considered arcade machines with the game Donkey Kong and the line of pocket micro-consoles Game & Watch. The secret of success was not only in the simplicity and price of NES, but also in the careful sorting of games: only certified and approved by the company games were allowed on the Nintendo platform. At the same time, all non-Nintendo companies that released games for NES, under the terms of the contract, could make a strictly limited number of games per year, and all of them remained exclusive only for this console.

The first game with the participation of a brave Italian was released in 1981, and recently Mario celebrated his own 30th birthday. The main, multi-platinum game featuring the hero Super Mario Bros. came out in 1985 and since then is considered an absolute classic. Other great NES series include Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda, which ended up in the VGA Hall of Fame as the main game series in the history of games. And hit, by the way, quite rightly. After Famicom / NES, almost all the consoles of the Japanese corporation sold millions of copies, with the exception of the failed Virtual Boy console.

3.2 Modern gaming industry

The sixth, seventh and eighth generations of consoles are actually “our time”, events that readers of this text could not miss if they wanted to. The fate of consoles in the Russian Federation and the world has made them more popular than PC games. The sixth generation is also notable for the fact that of the many competitors, only selected companies continued to deal with consoles: Sony, Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft, which joined the struggle.

The company of Bill Gates presented the Xbox console, sales of which were record low in Asia and quite modest in the States. Sony and Nintendo have noted improved versions of their previous creations - the GameCube was based on N64 technology, and the PS2 was a direct successor to the PlayStation One. Someone, like Sega, was increasing console performance, and Nintendo chose to focus on proven brands and conservative graphics.

Sega company with its actions dropped out of the race and buried the Dreamcast console itself with a chain of ill-conceived decisions. Launched in America on 9/9/99, one of the best variety of features and a game console base launched in America was destroyed by financial management mistakes, piracy, and the inability to compete on equal terms with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. At the same time, the console was the first in the history of such innovations as the built-in joysticks LED displays that help the player while playing Shenmue, Space Channel 5 Part 2 or Garou Densetsu, and the first online service that made an exit to the Internet with the prefix everyday reality.

One of the main ideologists of Dreamcast, Isao Okawa got $ 820 million for the unprofitable Sega to launch Dreamcast, and subsequently presented the company, which is on the verge of bankruptcy, with $ 720 million from its own pocket. Isao Okawa was able to save the company, but at what cost ... The deafening failure of Dreamcast buried him himself - a generous Japanese died of a heart attack in March 2001, at the same time that the fate of Dreamcast officially ended with her funeral.

Isao Okawa. The man who did not spare for the sake of his beloved set-top box Alas, only three large companies survived to the seventh generation: Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, whose 7th-generation consoles PS3, X360 and Wii are considered relevant to this day. Despite the failure of Sega as a manufacturer of consoles, Mega Drive and Dreamcast remain in special favor among Russian fans of console games. You can responsibly declare that the Sega brand is still trusted, giving old preference to games with the song “sa-ga”.

Along with home consoles and personal computers, handheld consoles are widespread - they differ in print runs no less than stationary consoles, and some individuals, such as GameBoy and Nintendo DS, set sales records and longevity.

However, the fashion for regional divisions introduced by Nintendo created a lot of obstacles for European and Russian players. The bottom line is that games created for the Asian and American regions cannot be run on a console of European origin. Many were losers: a considerable part of the games is localized only for the United States, and not everyone reaches Europe. For example, some of the ArcSys and Nippon Ichi Software projects reached Europe with significant delays, and the recent Arcade hit Contra 4 has remained the lot of the American and Japanese markets.

ÂAt the same time, from games sold in Europe, not everyone always reaches Russia (the most recent example is Tales of Abyss 3D for 3DS, which did not reach the Russian Federation due to the small PAL circulation), but they are sold at our place European price. It is these prices that depress many players: almost always, games sold in the United States at the same price are not converted in Europe at any rate, but simply change the currency from dollars to the currency of the Eurozone. Thus, the game, which cost $ 45 in the States, is sold in PAL territories for 45 euros.

The trend of the annual update of consoles is also more likely to upset console players - the “slimmer” Slim versions replaced the thick PSP and PS3 modifications, and the DS prefix survived four modifications, and it looks like 3DS is waiting for the same fate. A little more than a year after the release of the console, Nintendo introduced the XL-model of the console with an older screen and a more powerful battery. 20 years ago, consoles were updated with accessories and additional devices, and now every year new models come out for all consoles, which reduce the attractiveness of old options to zero.

Currently, there are 8 generations of consoles in the world, and now we are at the stage of a slow generation change. Officially, Nintendo and Sony continue to support the sixth and seventh generation of consoles, and therefore it’s too early to write off the “oldies”. Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 will not lose their relevance for a very long time - the price of them is gradually reduced, more technological models appear and the library of games is constantly expanding.

Now the eighth generation is represented by two portable consoles: Nintendo 3DS and Sony PlayStation Vita. Nintendo is also preparing to release at the end of 2012 the first home (i.e. not portable) eighth-generation WiiU console with support for HD-graphics and a new controller with a separate screen. For Big H, as they call it all over the world, switching to HD will be an unprecedented step, however, all other manufacturers have long been working with 720p and 1080p resolutions. We do not know about other surprises of the eighth generation, however, rumors about the console with the code name “Xbox 8” and the new PlayStation 3 modification with improved features are increasingly heard.

3.3 Future forecasts

Due to the advent of relatively inexpensive Apple devices as a gaming platform and cheap games for them in the AppStore, the future of portable consoles may be in doubt. Sony's aggressive pricing policy allows the company to sell modern Vita games from $ 30 to $ 50, which is not comparable with mobile phone toys for $ 1.99.

There is no doubt that people will continue to support mobile video games, such as 3DS cartridges, but sales of traditional console games are likely to gradually decline amid the increasing attractiveness of iOS and Android mobile gaming platforms every year. Nevertheless, PSP and DS are still in demand and remain consoles, successfully assembled. multi-million audience of fans - game developers take advantage of this and are not afraid to announce fresh games even in 2012.

The situation in Russia does not quite correspond to world sales for one reason: a stable economy has not yet been formed in the country that would encourage the development of a culture of game consumption. Due to economic troubles and imperfections in the legislation on copyright protection, piracy dictates its laws in the Russian Federation. The most popular prefix of the 7th generation is not Wii, as in the whole world, but the Xbox 360, which was “hacked” first, and for which a large number of cheap pirated games are sold. The handheld consoles sector holds the PSP, and DS sales are much higher in the rest of the world.

Of course, the future of the industry as a whole looks attractive - as practice shows, in the XXI century, masterpieces began to come out more often, and platform owners again and again take their series to new heights. Innovative games for the Kinect and Move manipulators have become commonplace, and almost every season is complete without pleasant discoveries: new technologies make it possible to diversify the game process with new emotions and experiences. Fresh examples of such innovative games: Gravity Rush, Journey, Child of Eden, Frozen Synapse, etc.

In contrast to them, modern best-selling games will increase the social segment and provide ample opportunities for socialization for players. Owners of smartphones will be able to combine the interactive experience of playing on consoles with interaction with thematic gadgets on Android and iOS. All major players will remain in their places, especially the time-tested Sony and Nintendo.

Despite the slightly incorrect Russian advertising that Dandy is better than computers, in the modern world the main sales and circulations of game products are provided by console editions of games. The largest number of sold copies of the "multiplatform" such as Call of Duty 6, Mass Effect 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Assassins Creed 2 falls on the console market, and some publishers like Capcom leave port games on the PC on a residual basis. Alas, the last 8 years the gaming industry is primarily consoles, as I would not like to convince myself of the opposite to fans of cheap and affordable PC Jewels.

The E3-2012 exhibition held in June this year made it possible for everyone to once again make sure that the industry is still alive, does not breathe, and the ghosts of 77 and 83 do not threaten it.

The crisis of ideas is offset by the ever-increasing quality of games. And new, technologically powerful consoles, which are now secretly under development, will attract even those people who had never thought of anything like this to video games. Today, computer games and video games are expensive, but it's worth it, in no way inferior to other traditional media entertainment.

4. The history of the development of game engines

An important stage in the development and establishment of the gaming industry as people know it at the moment is the development of game engines. This aspect plays a big role, because thanks to the engines, programmers and game designers can create games of different categories.

Together with the creation of the first games, programmers came to the conclusion that each game contains common components, even despite the difference in hardware platforms. And the first games took place on slot machines the size of a refrigerator.

The functionality common to games — graphical solutions, game mechanics, physics calculations, and more — began to stand out in separate libraries, but in order to be a “game engine” it was still a long way off. This was largely due to a serious difference in hardware and software platforms and the uncertainty in the games themselves. After all, genres and types of games had yet to be invented, despite the fact that many of the first games were textual. Actually, it was for the early adventure games and platformers that game engines began to emerge, especially with the development of graphics - the Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) can be a good example. When developing King’s Quest back in 1984, Sierra On-Line programmers faced the inconvenience of low-level development of such a complex and promising schedule in those days of the game - and developed a set of solutions, which AGI became. In total, it was released 14 different games in 5 years on 7 different platforms, so the concept of “cross-platform” was important even then.

However, the engines of that time rarely went beyond the original development company and, as a rule, were highly specialized for a specific genre of the game.

The situation began to change in 1993 after the release of the Doom game from id Software. Although the development of the Wolfenstein 3D engine was used in its development, in terms of capabilities and modularity in she made a real technological breakthrough. At that time, video processors were not able to work effectively with three-dimensional graphics, so John Carmack (the leading programmer of the engine) performed all the necessary mathematical calculations used to manipulate three-dimensional objects, light, shading, texture mapping and other things on their own. As a result, the image looked three-dimensional, in fact not being such. Therefore, the Doom engine (the first version of id Tech) was not truly three-dimensional, but pseudo-three-dimensional. But it’s important that the technical component of this game set the standard for what could be called a game engine. Namely, the Doom engine was modular, represented a set of subsystems, in it each clearly separated software layer was responsible for processing its portion of data. As a result, it has become much easier to use it for various games (Hexen, Heretic, Strife) and by third-party developers (Raven Software and Rogue Entertainment). Therefore, the appearance of game engines is attributed to the mid 90s of the 20th century, that is, then the definition of a game engine in the modern sense was finally formed.

The game engine is a kind of highly specialized operating system, since it includes all the modules of the latter. It includes: a memory management system, a graphics subsystem, an input system, an audio subsystem, artificial intelligence, a physical subsystem, a network subsystem, a game level editor, and more. In addition, the engine core can provide a special approach to working with files - a file (resource) system, as well as multithreading tools that differ from the main operating system. Modern game engines also include an interpreter of the scripting language, sharpened to describe the game logic, and often its completely visual editor. Its use allows you to ignore the description of low-level commands and instructions, and concentrate on the gameplay. At this, the components of the engine are not limited, they can be either more or less.

The game engine is primarily created in order to simplify and speed up development. Therefore, it includes tools for creating the game world - level modeling, importing objects, texturing, loading and animating characters, creating visual effects, setting up physics, and more.

The second significant goal of developing the engine is cross-platform or platform-independence of the game being developed. That is, the possibility of its launch with the least possible changes. Completely unchanged on another platform, the launch of the game will fail due to hardware differences, including: screen sizes, means and methods of control, etc.

The development of game engines takes place together or under the influence of the development of hardware and software platforms, together with the emergence of new game genres and changes in the tastes of users. In short, the development of the gaming industry as a whole.

In the mid-90s, after the appearance of video processors capable of processing three-dimensional graphics, software interfaces began to appear that simplified its development. Following the cross-platform OpenGL, Direct3D for Windows came onto the scene as part of DirectX. These 2 visualizers for many years to come determined the ways of graphic output in games.

In 1996, Quake was released on Quake Engine. This engine has had a tremendous impact on the gaming industry.

Almost until the end of the decade, id Software set the rhythm almost exclusively on the market for middleware for games (in other words, game engines). However, in 1998, Epic Games released the successful Unreal game on the engine of the same name - with a real technological breakthrough in terms of graphics. Leading programmer of the engine was Epic founder Tim Sweeney. Tim, along with Carmack, is the most significant figure in the history of the game industry engines - and the Unreal Engine in its 3 and 4 versions is very popular now. A year later, Unic Tournament became even more popular from Epic.

At the same time, rival software company id Software released the multiplayer game Quake 3 Arena (powered by id Tech 3), just like Unreal Tournament, which included online battles.

These two games became the flagships of the industry, determining its development for years to come.

There were not many players on the market. Therefore, their products were very expensive, and flagship engines were licensed only by sufficiently large developers,

ÑThe situation began to change radically around the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. Then a large number of tools for developing games began to appear on the market and in the public domain. The middleware business is gaining momentum.

First, the market was filled with graphical frameworks: Ogre, DarkGDK, etc., which provide the programmer with a high-level layer over the graphical API. At the same time, they differ from game engines in the complete absence of in-game editors.

Then, full-fledged game engines came to the market at prices appropriate for a small indie development team, among them: Torque 3D, Unity 3D, and many others. Even those starting as flagship engines - for example, CryEngine from Crytek and the previously mentioned Unreal Engine - began to use a much more affordable pricing policy and became available even to novice developers.

An important trend in the gaming industry is casual games. These, in essence, straightforward, but colorful puzzles that did not require furious interaction with the keyboard and mouse were technically simpler than three-dimensional hardcore shooters, so they did not require a strong modification of universal engines to develop them. But, on the other hand, new players appeared in the industry, such as: Torque Game Builder, HGE and others.

At the same time, thanks to World of Warcraft, MMORPGs became very popular in the gaming industry - and in parallel, many genres made more and more bets on multiplayer. A number of engines could not provide users with new functionality for client-server applications, so they went into oblivion. Other engines were adapted for the multiplayer world by developing server solutions for them, so Photon and SmartFox were developed for Unity 3D. The third type of universal engine, initially being a client-server, did not feel the changes. It includes Torque 3D. Also on the market there are new engines designed for global multiplayer games, for example HeroEngine, BigWorld, combining a server solution scalable for thousands of players and a client accessible to a specific player.

There were browser games on the market since the 90s, and then social networks gave them a rebirth. the need to effectively create games for the browser did not go unnoticed. Developers of universal engines, for example Torque 2D / 3D, Unity 3D, reacted quite quickly to this by releasing plug-ins for browsers that made it possible to display graphics directly in the latter window. At first, a visualizer based on Flash technology gained popularity, but for a number of reasons this technology is increasingly losing its market share. Therefore now for visualization on the web often used library for the JavaScript language - WebGL, which allows you to create interactive 3D-graphics. However, due to flaws in the language, such as the lack of multithreading, the library cannot fully satisfy the needs of game developers. It is being replaced by a W3C consortium (which includes: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, etc.) is developing a new low-level binary compiled WebAssembly format.

Toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century, mobile technology developed very rapidly. Like a bolt from the blue, mobile devices appeared in terms of power comparable to mid-range PCs and capable of launching powerful gaming applications with all the special effects possessed by low-level graphical interfaces. To what developers of game engines responded in some cases by creating specialized converters that create a code native to specific equipment (such as Unity 3D), and in others they upgraded their products for cross-platform (for example, Torque 2D, Cocos 2DX). Also, new players appeared on the market, offering cross-platform engines for the entire fleet of mobile devices, running at the speed of the native code. Examples of such tools: Corona SDK, Marmalade SDK, AGK (App Game Kit).

5. The study of artificial intelligence systems in the gaming industry

Since the inception of the gaming industry, starting with games like Pong, artificial intelligence has become an integral part of almost any computer game (the same applies to mobile games). Due to the fact that today many aspects of modern games (for example, graphics or sound) have reached an amazing degree of realism, the attention of developers is more and more focused on improving artificial intelligence. In recent years, there has been a great increase in interest in the development of gaming artificial intelligence tools, and in the latest gaming programs, such tools even come to the fore.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people, artificial intelligence is the brain of powerful cyborgs. This is not surprising, because in this context this term is used in science fiction films and books. For a programmer, artificial intelligence is a worn-out fashionable expression used to refer to a technology that, over the course of the twentieth century, has again and again failed to live up to its expectations. For scientists, artificial intelligence is an inexhaustible source of interesting problems, discoveries and scientific degrees.

The phrase "artificial intelligence" sounds powerful and even sublime. It seems something mysterious and incomprehensible, on which the real programming gurus work, owning secret, almost mystical knowledge. They give the machine the ability to think like a man.

However, gaming AI is just a set of rules and algorithms. Sometimes difficult, sometimes not very. As an example, take the game "Nimes", in which two alternately take objects from piles. Or tic-tac-toe. In both cases, the program comes down to a simple algorithm: the computer sequentially calculates all possible moves, and then selects the most profitable one.

Usual games, for the most part, are not far away. Let's say for the real-time strategy the hardest part is the path-finding algorithm. So that each unit can move around and avoid obstacles, the computer continuously calculates hundreds of route options and selects the shortest one.

Others seem to be an overbrain mainly due to artificial advantages in resources and the ability to manage the entire economy at the same time, the rest is a set of rules like attacks by waves and the sequence of construction of buildings. Experienced players are well aware of this and invariably find weaknesses.

Despite the modest initial capabilities, artificial intelligence entered the game almost from the very appearance of computers - it is much easier to teach a machine to interact with people within strictly defined rules than in the real world.

Sometimes developers try to create an AI that really simulates the work of the human brain, but there are only a few such examples. The most famous of these is a pet game called Creatures.

In 1992, the British scientist Steve Grand decided to try his hand at developing commercial software. He proposed to potential investors the idea of a virtual pet - a mouse that would live on the Windows desktop. She had to gradually learn new tricks thanks to the inherent neural network.

Later, the idea turned into a full-fledged game about virtual characters - norn. A furry creature hatches from an egg, and a person should help him to know the world: to teach every word, repeating it many times and showing what it means, and also to force him to perform simple actions, encouraging good behavior. Nevertheless, the Norns often forget the lessons and make mistakes - this is a huge achievement of the developers.

In order to exclude discrepancies and misunderstandings of the subject of this work, we denote the concept of “game artificial intelligence” and its scope. It is worth noting that game development is by no means a science, the software methods that developers implement are not standardized, certain algorithms used in the development of computer games are not formalized, so the III does not have a strict, formal definition.

The main goal of game artificial intelligence to this day remains to create the appearance of the intelligence of in-game characters, the naturalness of their behavior, reactions and the adequacy of their intentions. Artificial intelligence in the gaming industry quite often uses some branches of knowledge of artificial intelligence, like science in general, including a variety of algorithms for finding the optimal route, control and decision-making algorithms, which will be discussed in more detail below. However, the gaming industry also boasts rather complex, interconnected intellectual systems, which distinguish gaming intellectual systems into a completely independent field of knowledge.

Gaming artificial intelligence is often described using software techniques and other technical tools used by developers to write a computer game with the goal of creating so-called intelligent gaming systems, designed primarily to provide the player with an interesting gameplay, experience, sensation and experience from the game.

From a historical point of view, the term “intellectual” describes a person. It is by the presence of intelligence that a person differs from animals and plants. Nowadays, the word "intelligence" is used to describe one of the distinguishing features of people, if someone is called "highly intelligent", then this means a person who is especially mentally developed.

From a conceptual point of view, there is no doubt a universal form of intelligence. Both humans and animals possess a small fraction of this ability and find in themselves specific manifestations of universal intelligence. Apparently, we humans have inherited most of this universal ability. But due to the fact that the basis of our intelligence is biological nature, we are deprived of some characteristics of universal intelligence.

Most computer science researchers believe that biological intelligence is reproducible and that intelligence is not exclusively a human attribute. From this assumption, in essence, the conclusion follows that part of universal intelligence can be transferred to the machine. Thus, artificial intelligence is an artificially created analogue of intelligence produced by the human brain as a biological being. Obviously, the development of technical means leads to results other than biological evolution, and this is an explanation of the fact that artificial intelligence is characterized by other properties compared to human intelligence (for example, thoroughness in everything). Thus, artificial intelligence is another manifestation of universal intelligence.

In the absence of a better definition, we will assume that intelligence is a set of skills that allow people to solve problems in conditions of limited resources. These skills include learning ability, abstract thinking, planning ability, imagination and creativity. They constitute the most important aspects of human intelligence.

Given how wide the palette of skills that form the intellect, we can not formulate a problem, the solution of which could be used as an intelligence test. Thus, even animals exhibit elements of intelligence: for example, they can survive on their own in natural conditions and manage their time. Insect colonies are also able to quickly adapt to habitat changes to protect their nests. Even popular IQ tests measure, rather, not so much the level of intelligence as the level of fitness and the ability to pass such tests. In other words, such tests measure intelligence only in its narrow sense.

Computer gaming artificial intelligence tools have to solve the same tasks during the game as people, but with using artificial intelligence methods. Artificial intelligence tools control the characters of computer games, successfully achieving the illusion of purposeful activity

Artificial intelligence is a scientific field that studies methods for solving complex problems using machines, similar to the methods that people use to solve such problems. As a rule, these methods come down to modeling the characteristics of biological intelligence and applying the obtained models in the form of algorithms reproduced on computers.

Artificial intelligence algorithms can be used to solve almost any problem, and not just to model human intelligence. For example, they can be used to control a production line in an industry or for pattern recognition in medicine. These methods become part of the scientific field dedicated to the study of the tasks of artificial intelligence, due to the presence of common characteristic features between biological and artificial intelligence (for example, the ability to learn or abstraction).

Artificial intelligence, as a scientific discipline, is at the intersection of many other disciplines (for example, computer science, psychology and mathematics). Each of them, in turn, is based on a huge layer of knowledge accumulated by mankind about nature surrounding us and about ourselves. Given such an extensive range of issues related to the modeling of artificial intelligence, it is very difficult to say what belongs to the field of scientific interests of scientists involved in this topic and what does not. The scientific interests of artificial intelligence specialists are constantly expanding, invading other areas of human knowledge; this indicates the maturity of this scientific direction and the correspondence of its scientific apparatus to other natural-scientific theories.

Conclusions

In the course of work, popular technologies and equipment that are currently being used were analyzed. An analysis was made of how rapidly technologies, software are developing and what impact this has on the gaming industry.

It was also considered that not only software and components form modern computer or console game projects, but also artificial intelligence. This topic was also touched upon and analyzed.

The result of the study was created a gaming application that displays all of the above.

A high-quality synthesis of digital systems, and Moore's automata in particular, is one of the areas of logical design and represents not only theoretical research, but also practical interest. The development of optimal digital devices paves the way for a fuller use of the capabilities of the implementation basis, “compaction” of projects, and reduction of material costs.

Further research is aimed at deepening and elaborating on this topic in order to reveal it from all possible sides.

When writing this essay, the master's work is not yet completed. Final completion: June 2020. The full text of the work and materials on the topic can be obtained from the author or his leader after the specified date.

List of sources

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