Xaitment: The early years

In a feature looking at the way xaitment is attempting to cater for high-level behaviours and learning with its modular middleware solution, the company’s co-founder has detailed the ups and downs of the German firm’s early history.

“When we started, we came from a University background and we were full of all of these great ideas,” Dr. Andreas Gerber told Develop. “We saw games like F.E.A.R, and the planning and dynamic and adaptive AI that was in them and thought, hey, everyone needs this. In truth, a lot of people said that, although it was nice, they really didn’t need it.”

Subsequently, Gerber and his colleagues had to re-asses their plans, and identify a problem in game development that needed solving.

“We came to the point where we realised we needed to provide developers with tools that would really help the internal workflow – especially to decouple the creative part from the development part. Often we see that the game designer and game programmer are completely separate people. One is quite structured, the other is quite creative. The designer comes up with the design, the programmer implements it, and then the designer says ‘actually, no, that’s not what I intended.’ And then you’re stuck in a loop,” added Gerber.

Click here to read the full feature, which details the latest updates and key features of xaitFramework 2.5.