GBW: In the video game world, the spotlight always seems to be on developers and producers, leaving out the critical middleware in between. Take us into the world of middleware and tell us where you guys step into the pipeline and begin to give life to a game.

MS: The focus of our company is to provide high-end production tools as well as professional services. We step in whenever a studio would like to automate processes in AI development that it has previously spent many man-hours on. The real value of our tools - as far as I see it - is the potential for free resources and the ability to allow studios to spend time on those pipeline steps. This makes the difference between an AAA game and a failure.

GBW: How does xaitment make the intricate task of artificial intelligence user-friendly and suitable for any project? How much experience does one need to have to utilize your tools?

MS: I worked over the last 10 years in the publishing business far away from any development and the last time I touched some kind of code was 20 years ago. When I joined xaitment it took me about two days to be able to use our AI tools. Our tools are specifically designed to be integrated into any project within a day and to be usable the next day. In my opinion, this is the future of middleware and historically comparable with previous technical developments in other creative or tech markets, like film and music.

GBW: In terms of projects, in which game genres has your company had the most success? Give us some examples.
MS: In terms of genre, we are most successful when it comes to MMOs and First Person Shooters, but there are also several RTS projects utilizing our tools. We are very happy to have our tools used in most of the recent MMO projects in Asia at companies such as Tencent and Gamania. One of the more prominent projects would be Taming Dragons in Heaven done by Jade Studio/Tencent, which is on the top of the “most anticipated games in 2011” list in China. We also licensed xaitment tools for projects in Japan and Korea but I can’t give you any details yet. In the U.S. and Europe, many established customers such as Gas Powered Games, Xaviant or Gameforge are using our AI tools as well.

GBW: For those of us who are novices on the topic of artificial intelligence, explain the difference between high level AI versus standard level AI.

MS: I’m not sure if there is a commonly-accepted definition for this difference, but let me explain how xaitment uses these terms. Standard AI would be what is used in 99 percent of today’s games, e.g. controlled movement of NPCs, reasonable and reoccurring behaviors--even smart bot actions in a FPS would be quite standard. For this level we offer what we call the “xaitment Professional Pack” that allows studios to make a check in the AI box and not worry anymore.

High level AI goes a step further and includes a world perception of the AI, memory of what is happening in the game world and a dynamic behavior based on that and on future learning in the game world. We offer two tools for achieving this which are added in our “Ultimate Package.”

GBW: Can you tell us what all five of xaitment's AI tools can do and how they can work together, or even separately, to bring high and standard level AI to a game?

MS: The before mentioned “xaitment Professional Pack” includes three of our AI modules, which are:

xaitMap -- Enabling innovative navigation mesh calculation and efficient pathfinding.

xaitMove -- An easy-to-use and customizable entity and unit movement framework.

xaitControl -- A graphical FSM creator for logic modeling and debugging.
We have benchmarks versus all other existing AI systems in the market and are happy to share them with our clients.

In the “Ultimate Package,” we add the high level AI tools xaitThink and xaitKnow that allow developers to model their world ontology and complex rules based on this world model. And of course, as with all of our tools, this is done within an easy-to-learn graphical environment.

GBW: Another aspect that xaitment takes pride in is the licensing program for indie game developers with smaller budgets. How did this come about and how is it implemented?

MS: In the beginning xaitment was focused heavily on AAA games and the top publishers/developers. Especially during the last year, we were contacted over and over again with requests from indie studios with limited funding but great game ideas. This is why we came up with a new “light” version of our tool suite that is limited to a certain extent but still allows smaller studios to build AAA AI into their games. Of course we have to somewhat limit our highly-acclaimed personal service, but no one will ever be left alone and every indie developer can count on our excellent support.

For the full interview, please visit GamesBizWire.