11) John Parks Ubi's Marketing Director said that Far Cry will have a very progressive AI. Could you please give some detail what makes your AI so smart? What are the advantages of your AI routines?

DG: One thing that FC brought forward was AI that were not scripted. There is a lot of shooters out there where if you play a section and quick load back and replay it, AIs will pretty much redo the same thing. They are scripted to react in a constrained manner. Far Cry wanted to let the player use varied strategies so it offered a systemic AI that fed on what was happening in the world to take decision, not what a designer wanted it to do at the time the game environment was built by predicting what the player would do. FC2 pushes further in that direction. Now with an open world game, we need our AI to be even more systemic and we are working at enriching the things it can do in the world. In order to do that, we need to feed our AI with a lot of information on what is happening around them.

Also, the AI in FC2 "lives" in the world, they are not just waiting to be shot at by the player. They have basic needs that they need to satisfy and they go about their business satisfying those needs. Obviously, those needs change according to the time of day or weather: for example most people like to sleep at night. ;-)
12) Your title will not be released before 2008 and by then many players will have changed to Windows Vista and PC hardware that supports the new DirectX 10 API. Will your engine support DX10? If yes, what are the technical advantages of that API?
If there will be no support for Direct X 10 what were your reason to do without?

DG: Yes, Dunia supports DX9 and DX10. DX10 has all sorts of interesting advantages from a developer point of view but in a simplistic manner, among other things, you could say it brings extra performance as the API layer has less overhead then DX9. For the player, it can translate in having more detailed graphics and/or a better frame rate. The impact is not so big that it means games must only support one or the other: it is possible to build a game in a manner where it can run under both APIs with different settings. One thing to note is that as far as the GPU itself is concerned, ultimately the raw power of the card is more important then the API that it is running under. Obviously, a high end DX9 board is still much more powerful then a low end DX10 one.