Interview: Xaitment's New Opportunities For AI Middleware

Within the long console cycle, and amid emerging markets, game developers are increasingly looking at behavior, pathfinding and AI as a new frontier for advancement in games. That's what Mike Walsh, new CEO of middleware developer Xaitment has observed. Walsh joined Xaitment a few months ago from physics house Havok, where he was VP of sales. Walsh says Havok began developing its AI product about a year before he changed jobs, and even then he observed increasing interest from middleware users in increasing the sophistication of AI solutions. "You've got your HD TV with tremendous graphics, certainly the physics have gotten better, but the AI is still not quite there," Walsh tells Gamasutra. "I think we're seeing a really large turn toward AI." In his experience that extends not just to an increased market for pathfinding solutions -- "the immediate need" for most companies, in Walsh's view -- but for individual character behavior as well as crowd movement. Xaitment's product suite is developed to address what the company sees as distinct spheres of the AI market: The ability to quickly create nav meshes, which it aims to serve with XaitMap, and a stronger marriage between design and engineering in the development of character "intelligence," which its XaitControl is geared to address. Next year it will release a third product, which will offer behavior and knowledge modeling. This new offering, a modular solution, will consist of a marriage between its XaitThink and XaitKnow tools in development. The further development of Xaitment's product suite is being funded by a new investment round, about $1.6 million led by Triangle and Kfw in Germany. "We're focused on the third product, but there are certainly things we also want to enhance with Xaitmap and Xaitcontrol," Walsh explains. He's of the school of thought that modular engine and middleware team-ups that developers can customize to their team sizes and project needs remain the best way to offer technology for game development. "We intend to continue to make it modular," he says. A modular software offering can help middleware providers introduce new userbases easily, he suggests. Like many providers capitalizing on the game industry boom in Asia, Xaitment has gained quite a lot of new ground in Korea and China recently. "Some of those folks aren't quite advanced yet on the AI front, and what they really want to tackle now is nav mesh and pathfinding," Walsh explains. "Then maybe for their next game, they say, 'okay, we've got pathfinding solved, now we want to do a little bit more character behavior." Integration partnerships with engine providers remain relevant, he says. "We value our partnerships with the Vision engine, and with Bohemia Interactive... and then we have a partnership with Gamebryo, or GameBase," Walsh describes, adding that Xaitment is currently working on what he calls a "really important" upcoming partnership. But a modular approach that prioritizes flexibility for the end user is going to become increasingly "critical" for companies like Xaitment given the new frontiers in the casual, mobile and social spaces. From a technology standpoint developers in those spaces are often "not as experienced as the console developer... they won't know as much about AI." He hopes the company's pathfinding solutions can help add lifelike qualities to those new spaces, and that a modular software approach will help the tech evolve at the pace the studios do. At the recently-concluded GDC Online, "I was really pleasantly surprised," Walsh says. "We had three or four different meetings with non-traditional [console] game developers. I met some new and intriguing people at the show who have a different kind of massively-multiplayer game, and they're very successful... and this was a company we hadn't known much about." "They created their own market, and now they're reaching tech barriers where we're saying, 'we've written most of our own code, but it's getting pretty intensive now, and if we're going to make it a better game, we've gotta look outside internal development and see what else is out there that we can use. And AI is one of the things we're focusing on.'" "That's becoming such a rapidly-growing part of the market, and these developers are starting to get to the point where they realize they can't do everything else themselves," Walsh concludes.