Start-up studio banks on Xaitment tools

Xaviant, the young development studio based in the US city of Atlanta, is using a number of tools from AI group Xaitment for its debut project.

The largely unknown Xbox 360 game, entitled Black Orchid, is currently in “a critical phase” of its development according to company COO George Chapman.

The game is thought to be a third-person action adventureRPG title, and was announced was being built with the Gamebryo LightSpeed engine.

Yet the studio announced today that a suite of Xaitment tools have also been licensed for the project, from xaitControl to xaitThink and xaitKnow.

A joint-statement read that xaitControl was being used to “speed the creation of complex character behaviours by allowing its developers to create data driven, hierarchical, probabilistic Finite State Machines (FSMs) in a graphical interface, rather than with complex code.”

On top of this, the developer has also licensed the xaitKnow and xaitThink tools, both of which are built to simplify game management by replacing code with the likes of graphical editors and rule-based editors.

“Xaitent’s tools for AI behaviour represent exactly what we have been looking for in an AI package," said Xaviant CEO Michael McMain. “They really provide us with a simple way of achieving vastly superior and far more realistic game AI. We’re really excited to see the results in Black Orchid."