Artificial intelligence in games (Dan's series of articles)

Off-topic
#12

The AI handles the more general, automated, robotic actions that are supposed to be done on some regular basis with no respect to whether the player is present, or watching. The scripted parts are created specifically for certain actions that are supposed to happen when the player is around, they are there to be watched and to enhance the “immersion”.

For the scenario that you described… I guess the AI would be covering the core part about the villagers gradually sharing a piece of information on “the traveler was asking…”, if the dialogue option gets triggered by you while talking to one of them. Depending on the AI it would either get distributed to all (or selected few) of them automatically (with a delay to simulate the time necessary for the gossip to spread), or it could possibly work the way you suggested - with each NPC having to physically meet the other to distribute the information further.
Dan Vávra mentioned that this is the way he wants to deal with the player’s reputation in KCD. News spreading through some AI-driven “gossip” mechanics. Sounds pretty neat…

But during such an NPC encounter, the information could still just transfer inside the game’s system without much real action in-game. That would be when the scripts come in.
If it was supposed for the gossip to actually happen in the game (to be possibly encountered and overheard by the player), that would mean including it in a scripted scene with some pre-set dialogue for the NPCs to happen in parallel.

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#13

ah, o.k., I see. Thank you! So it was mainly a matter for the AI. Had ever thought about it years ago, as it would be if the nature (weather, season, soil conditions and events (in) the game world) would act as a “drive” for actions / intentions of the NPC (depending on the job description in modified form) and then - would respond to player actions - filtered through a priority system. Then you could then here’s a “no time, come by later” or “Help me to do this or that” come. Probably in this case stands for each encounter with an NPC open a variety of options, but would also work very credible. Later, when diplomacy should play a greater role, it probably will not otherwise go without it seems static. Could also think that in a true sandbox the laws of nature must play an essential role, no matter, what age is playing in game. Unfortunately, the “forces of nature” from Raindrop to the bacterium must install the programmer … :neutral_face: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Think before all developers so far (understandably) were afraid. On the other hand, it is a question to extent to which the simulation of the elements is necessary to achieve a credible result. Was there ever approaches in this direction?

#14

Eventuell zur Erklärung - unter einer “Sandbox” verstehe ich einen großen Haufen (Form)-Sand in einem abgegrenzten Terrain. Einige Terrain-Editoren und minecraft kommen immerhin in die Nähe des Begriffes, die Spiele dann bewegen sich aber “auf” dem Sand, sind Projektionen auf eine Oberfläche. Ein wesentlicher Schritt war minecraft, wo immerhin “mit” Teilen des Sandes gespielt wird, wenn auch in sehr groben Raster. “Open-World” bedeutet nicht zwingend “Sandbox”, allerdings könnte eine wirklich durchdachte Sandbox diesen Open-World-Games ordnende Elemente zuweisen. Da würden dann nachts keine Vogelschwärme fliegen, es stände im Hochsommer nicht tagelang Wasser in Pfützen, ohne dass es regnet, Bauern würden nicht leere Felder bestellen, wenn gleichzeitig Früchte an Bäumen hängen und, und, und…

Perhaps explanation - under a “sandbox”, I mean a big pile (form) -sand within a defined territory. Some terrain editors and minecraft come at least in the vicinity of the term, but the games then move “on” the sand, are projected onto a surface. An important step was minecraft, where at least is played “with” parts of the sand, but in very rough grid. “Open-world” does not necessarily mean “sandbox”, but could assign this open-world games ordering elements a really well thought sandbox. Since no flocks of birds would then fly at night, it stands in the height of summer days in water puddles, without it rains, farmers would order nonempty fields when simultaneously hanging fruit on trees and, and, and …

#15

varva actually talks quite lot about how such expanded artificial scripting cna be applied to shooter games. i once remember maybe over a decade back, a project from his former company featured a very good looking fps focused on east european soldiers, i think.

there was a cutscene, some small gameplay, all looking like very high production value.

but it never came to fruition. i wonder if that was one of his projects that the company didn’t go with.

#16

This is why I see great potential in game streaming.

There has been much said about why cloud based gaming is a bad idea. I guess I need not link to that arguments here. I want to talk about why cloud might actually do a lot of good too.

Running the game in the cloud often changes the “this is impossible because it is too performance intensive” into “this is impractical, because it (significantly) increases costs of development and operations”. One cannot fight the impossible, but engineering is all about making the impractical be practical.

Imagine that instead of casting “four or five invisible rays” on the CPU we will be able to actually render the scene from the point of view of every (relevant) NPC on the GPU. We will of course have to change the textures first: the enemy objects will be drawn in red, the friendly ones in blue and everything else in green. Now the problem of detecting the enemy is a simple one: look at the rendering and count the number of red pixels. The great thing is that if we can afford to render things like reflection in the environment, the NPCs will be able to see the players reflection in a mirror and evaluate it as “hostiles spotted”. Amazing!

Now onto evaluating if the detected enemy should be actually noticed. I have few ideas there but nothing solid. (which is why I am still writing this instead of running my own Kickstarter :wink:

The bad thing is that we might need more than one GPU and more than one computer to do all this. That is the reason why I said at the beginning that the development costs and operations costs would be high. If this ever comes to be, I expect it will happen first in MMOs or other multiplayer games which would allow amortizing the financial cost of vision computations over a larger pool of players than single player does.

Now, running a game in the cloud on a cluster and taking advantage of everything this environment brings is hard, so if ever it comes to this, it certainly won’t be soon.

#17

Hello again, just finished the third part and here it goes!

Once more, I’m sorry for it taking so long. My last few weeks before Christmas are also pretty busy. I probably wouldn’t be able to finish the last part during the next week, but I will make sure to have it ready by the last weekend before Christmas (in two weeks).

Have a nice reading until then!

Translation: @bebuce
Proofreading: @PhanTom_CZ

Artificial intelligence in games #3: Nobody wants a smart AI

How is the third Arma going to deal with teammate’s AI?

Cooperation

Mutual cooperation of its entities is a difficult task for an AI. Most players would probably think of a special forces squad advancing by-the-book in a perfect formation. In reality it all actually starts with the NPCs not walking into each other’s line of fire, in everyone not trying to take cover behind the same crate, or in sharing the player’s location.

Of course, the commercial AIs can do even the advanced show-offs, just like a squad moving in a perfect formation, or a crowd scene simulation with a thousand of figures pushing each other. If you take a look at a presentation demo of Kynapse AI, you will see how nicely it works.

What’s the problem then? Why do the NPCs in most games just limit themselves to popping up, spraying you with an unlimited amount of ammo and then going down after a single hit, while your mates are keeping their respectful distance somewhere behind and are capable only of getting stuck somewhere, or running straight into your line of fire to get accidentally killed? The veterans will now shed a tear in the memory of meeting the special forces in Half-Life for the first time and those crazy maneuvers of your enemies in F.E.A.R. Why don’t games make use of all that today’s AI can do?

Game versus reality

The thing is that the game is not reality and the goal is usually not to create a perfect simulation of some complicated activity, but to simplify it so that even a normal, untrained person can try and “live” through it. The creator has to find a balance between the game being a challenge, while also being entertaining rather than frustrating at the same time, so that the player has a good feeling from his accomplishments.

Everyone who ever tried multiplayer, airsoft, paintball or an actual war knows that to kill a living enemy is much, much harder than in any FPS game and we are not even talking about the moral difficulty of such an act, but about the very struggle to win. If you happen to face several well coordinated enemies just on your own, you’re practically helpless and good feeling is the last thing you will get.

I recently tried that out by myself in a paintball pistol tournament of three-person squads. The moment when you’re alone against three cooperating opponents is when you’re screwed, as you can’t cover three directions at once and any intelligent opponent of course surrounds its pray. The victorious team managed to get through nine matches without losing once and even with a single casualty, (which, as it happens, was my only kill in the tournament worthy of a record :).

Yet the basic premise of most games is the player standing alone against a huge swarm that he has to overcome, which puts the designers to an almost hopeless situation. The players are calling for awesome artificial intelligence, but if they got it, the game would be unplayable and vast majority of players wouldn’t like it at all.

The simplest thing the designers can do for the player to make his fights with the NPCs easier is to give him an advantage. Usually by giving his avatar some more endurance. This, however, leads to another undesirable outcome - the AI, set to expect its enemy to die after getting hit, would be somewhat “taken by surprise” that the player didn’t die and keeps on returning the fire with joy.

What now? If we leave the NPC standing in place and shooting until the player drops, that eliminates the original advantage we gave to the player. If the AI runs from the player, it would look stupid and we are back where we started.

If you count in the teammates on the player’s side, which are usually important for story progression, so they shouldn’t die, we are already quite far from achieving some believable simulation. Most designers don’t want the teammates to be able to achieve victories for a passive player and on the other hand they are also trying to avoid getting them killed, so that the player would not have to restart the level angry, for the failure was not his fault.

Probably everyone can recall the absurd situations in lots of games where you have a crowd of mutually antagonistic characters running around in a small space, everybody shooting like crazy, yet nobody dies. This is a result of exactly those problems. Another natural advantage the player has is to be able to repeat the part where he had a problem. The player knows what to expect and can use it to his advantage, while the AI starts fresh with each restart.

Do you remember HECU? Some people have the enemies from Hazardous Environment Combat Unit in Half-Life games chasing them in their sleep to this day

Imperfect reality

This raises a question of what should be called “realistic” and what is an “error”. If you go watching real people in a multiplayer game, you will probably see a lot of funny situations - friendly fire, throwing grenades under their own feet, pointless running around… If an AI does that, we would consider it a bug. Yet similar mistakes happen even in the real fights.

Friendly fire is a very serious issue in every war and who thinks that soldiers can’t get lost probably never tried walking in the woods with a map. Does it bother you that your teammates in Flashpoint react differently to your commands than you expected? You should try commanding some real people in a similar situation, you would quickly realize that they often behave in even more unpredictable and stupid ways than their computer variants.

It’s no wonder then that game designers started to focus on scripted coordinated puppet plays. We could use most introductory missions in Call of Duty as a good example. The designer gets a task to create a scene were the player’s unit storms a building and neutralizes the terrorists inside. If he decides to script that, it means he has to painstakingly develop every second of the action. He needs to set up all the animations for each soldier and time it carefully.

There was a lot of hype about F.E.A.R before its release and it has been quite justified afterwards

Everything in-game has to be set up so that the player couldn’t break it. A great thing is that if you can motion-capture it all, the final scene will look absolutely fantastic and only a few things could go wrong. The downside is that it will remain the same every time and the player will soon realize that he’s not really a player, but just a viewer.

Only few choose to go the other way, taking an AI, giving it a task and letting the things unfold on its own. To stand up in scrutiny against the scripts, the AI must be able to perform some visually impressive macho actions - to kick out doors, to take cover behind obstacles, to tilt while running in an arc… in short, to have perfect animations.

The drawback is that the animation sequences synthesized in real time from prepared universal moves can’t compete with a script which often uses animations that were captured for that scene specifically. The clear advantage is that every playthrough can be completely different and the player has a huge freedom of action.

Everybody makes mistakes. Who knows if that Korean that keeps crashing into the fence isn’t just under the influence of North Korean ideology and does it on purpose

Every script has its purpose

The main issue and I dare say the main reason why most developers prefer scripting over creating a solid AI is that the result is largely unpredictable and it can turn against its creators. Even if you put all that you can into testing and QA, you can never be sure what would happen and the more freedom the AI has, the more likely it is that something won’t happen the way you wanted.

Crysis 2 can serve as a proof. The creators were boasting about their most advanced AI ever to be found in a game, yet they got ridiculed. Every NPC that got stuck, threw a grenade under its feet, or couldn’t react properly to the player, was used against them as if they were lying. With a bit more exaggeration you could say that this kind of mockery is similar to someone ridiculing the God for having created people who suck at playing Counter Strike.

The environment in current games is usually huge and the AI, like the one in Crysis 2, simply does what it wants. A certain amount of errors, embarrassments and troubles is almost inevitable. Just like the players do make mistakes, so does the AI. Although, of course, this should be happening as rarely as possible.

Dan will close this four-part series about the fundamentals of gaming AI with a treatise on why AI in games is (still) not capable of sensible communication and natural behavior and why we probably wouldn’t even ever want that.

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#18

That’s because you rewrote nearly everything I translated :wink: Sometimes it feels to me like an enactment of slightly changed version of Adam Savage’s (of Discovery channel fame) motto: “I refuse your translations and replace them with my own”.

That’s the best part, IMO.

#19

Sorry, I’m really trying not to be too intrusive and resort mostly to the stylistic stuff. But I also sometimes tend to be nit-picky, especially with the thought that there might be lots of people reading it after me. :slight_smile:
That translator you use always marks everything and makes it look like there’s nothing left of the original, that looks exaggerated! :smiley:

#20

If you select a sentence, click “Show all x versions” and hover over the text with your mouse, it highlights the changes character by character.

#21

I’m not a programmer (unfortunately - or fortunately?) But maybe it helps to orient themselves to the construction of fortresses. At all times, was trying to take over the number of attackers funnel shape to the minimal number of defenders to reduce / focus. For this purpose, we used sophisticated kennel facilities, restricted access to (low) gates, stairs, at the end ladders and planks that were pulled away in the dungeon during the retreat. The aim was always to eliminate only the first row of the attacker, without allowing them the opportunity of the attack on all defenders. Similarly, it worked in the (ideal) orders of battle. Friendly-Fire is acceptable if defenders are in the majority, the risk was factored in battles often and was part of the strategy. Often was fighting, orderly retreat by taking advantage of the (previously investigated for suitability) terrain the only viable strategy for victory - or at least to a stalemate. Ultimately, it came to undermine the enemy’s morale and increase the price of a (still more uncertain) victory. And - as in reality - it usually remains the escape as a last resort, when a fight can not be won. This decision, however, is the heaviest fighting, as Blücher wrote all right … As long as an escape route is available, the player also has a choice, he just needs to make the right decision. Oh yes, there was in the Middle Ages also the possibility to ask for mercy? Neither is glorious, but survivable.

#22

Sieges in a RPG computer game work usually this way. First, there is a cinematics showing how the castle walls were overcome, then a playable sequence where the player runs around the castle and kills few enemies, finally a boss fight with the king. Enemies appear in waves and rush at the player. They never retreat. If they do retreat or surrender, it is again a scripted cutscene which is triggered when the player kills enough enemies and advances far enough.

From what we’ve heard until now, I expect KC:D to follow this pattern, maybe with a few deviations. We may be for example allowed to shoot from a trebuchet a couple of times before the “get over the castle walls” cinematics starts.

#23

Think, if the player is not unrealistically powerful, the principle should work well in battles. We will see …

#24

so you think there’s going to be something like a boss fight with the king in this game. please read the faqs again.

#25

There is sure going to be a boss fight, I don’t really care with whom, that’s just a plot detail.

#26

if the player isn’t unrealistically powerful then most bigger battles consist mostly out of reloading. :wink:

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#27

Hey Guys.
Nice to see that some people like to discuss these topics…

I wanted to share some views on this with you, just some little thing here and there.

(There are some talks about these things we made at Cons, Conferences etc, there is a PhD thesis coming along (slooowly… :blush: )

What makes an NPC tick/think
One key component of any NPC is the decision-making mechanism (DMM). You can call it its brain. But basically what it does is “selecting an action to do”. If the NPC is beyond an automaton, it may take various inputs into account (perception, hearing, commands, internal state etc.) - either external or internal. The NPC decides ( If it is rainy, go Home / If it is sunny go to beach). A rigid script is only a text of commands (actually the most simplistic approach).

So basically the NPC is doing the same thing as You are doing - looking at the world and thinking what can it do next. (this is why we dont call our NPCs actors, since they are not reading a script :slight_smile: )

If there are no inputs, its the same, the NPC is just an stupid automaton without reactions (an movie script). The decision making mechanisms vary - e.g. finite state automata, event based scripts, decision trees, behavioral trees, classical planning etc.

There are two big groups of such DMM’s - reactive and deliberative. Where reactive mechanisms only take the current situation into account and deliberative try to look ahead (i.e. plan something). There are various hybrid architectures, but that is rather complicated to get working.

Actually even the Game AI has moved beyond the “rigid” concepts into much more fluid and autonomous ones. It is long time not true that the AI cannot think on its own, since it depends on how you view this trait. The question here is only, how complex the thought process has to be, and how “reasonable”. And how much will we get computational power to do it right :smile: In most cases, games are developed in the "lets not spend that much time on AI lets make it look more shiny :slight_smile: "

Here it is where the “illusion of intelligence” comes into play - we humans actually perceive only the illusion of intelligence by its demonstration that we try to map to our own intelligence as a reference. Thus comes the believable illusion of intelligence. If you look up stuff like The Chinese Room or The Touring Test you will get the picture of what I’m talking about.

About rigid scripts
The above me described “movie scripts” or those by Dan described “player centric design” is one way to approach it, when there is no intention to build actual artificial simulated life. Life is by definition dynamic, it changes, adapts. And that is the most key thing in an game AI - the capability to adapt.

Others
There are various ways to do it, Sims (Affordances of Needs) did it very good, Black And White did it in a really cool way (actual learning), Noone Lives Forever (STRIPS like planning) was superb. We call ours the “Injected Intelligence” ™

How is it done at KC:D
It is rather complicated :wink: We even publish academic papers about it :blush:

http://artemis.ms.mff.cuni.cz/main/tiki-publications.php

To not go into any boring technical detail, we dont do scripts in a traditional way. Our core AI technology is build around the notion of Behavioral Trees that we modified very heavily to serve our dark needs. And by heavily I mean truly heavily. (It is based on If-Then trees from Joanna Bryson and reworked (if someone can dig up my master thesis, you can read up the deep technical details of a lot of our stuff)

Simply, there are several various components to our AI - high level, executional and low level. Low level are mostly those that manage stuff like navigation and pathfinding, NPC2NPC communication, animation stuff, data scopes etc. The execution level is more like a script but not that much - is much more complex, due to its parallel nature (coroutines is the keyword if you like technical details). On the top, there are planning mechanism, either rigid or adaptive, where actually an NPC decides what to do based on its goals, tasks, needs. Finally there is a connectivist level, which provides the NPC world with relations to all what is in the virtual world.

Where is the NPC’s working place? What is the relation to the player? How much does it like to go to a tavern in Samposh? all these questions can be answered rather simply (math magic :innocent: )

And finally we have the Injected Intelligence - imagine it like this - your head is completly hollow and you walk around the world with the intention to do something. You are drawn to stuff (or you just high level plan it), like you want to work, go to a party at the tavern, etc.
Since you have the connections/relations to places and stuff, you just request something that is to your liking (a place of “fun” or example).

But what to do at that place. … since you are hollow, lets fill that void.

Just ask the place “How to do Fun”. Place can tell you executional detail (“Look for a cup, fill it up, drink it”). But how to drink? You dont know … but you want to drink, just ask the cup “how to pick it up and party”. Do you catch the drift? The intelligence is spread across places and things, it is hidden in various places, the NPC just needs to ask. We call it intelligence decomposition and and intelligence injection :sunny:

And to just spark your mind - imagine that the conectivism level is adaptive, that it may change based on actions (either player’s or NPCs) and events. That even you can create new connections, that you can get new connections by talking to other NPCs (e.g. 2 NPCs meet at the tavern and one tells the other about the nice old rich herbalist - aaah lets make a connection there, lets head there some day to talk)

But that is only what can be told :slight_smile: there is much more dark magic beneath the hood. And by dark, I mean truly dark magic.

And just a small AI goof - the AI world sees the Player as a very simplistic NPC, and actually the Player has internal AI that integrates him into the AI world the same way the NPCs do integrate… When you do something in the world as a player, you actually do it as an NPC :imp:

Respects
We have drawn most of our inspiration from Sims, where they solve a similar issue, but a liiitle bit differently.

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#28

Artificial intelligence in games #4: Communication problem

#Artificial Communication

Video games are often criticized for being too violent. Perhaps this is true to some extent, however, the question is whether anything can be done with it; can we just replace the conflict, which is the main focus of most games, with something else? What about communication? People do like chit chat, gossip or romantic TV series, so why nobody yet turned the TV show “Surgeries from the Rose Garden” [popular Czech telenovela at the time. note. transl.] into a game? The answer is simple. Because that would require and AI capable of keeping up an interesting conversation and this is a problem. It probably could be done, but it is not easy.

On the internet you can get (click here, it is free) an interesting experimental game Façade, which is trying to do something like that. Old-timers may remember the title Seaman for the Dreamcast, where you could grow a strange creature in a virtual aquarium and then communicated with it via a microphone. The Internet is littered with all kinds of chat bots, various attempts at passing the Turing test, which can be quite a tolerable discussion partner on various topics, and are even able to learn.

Creating an NPC which could be engaged in small talk so the player could get information in a different way than just clicking one of the two offered conversation options seems possible. How would be such game played? Would be the player required to type or speak to the mic? Typing is not fun for the masses, but speaking to a microphone is not without issues either. Speech recognition has made a significant advances, yet it is not an ideal way how to communicate with the game.

Screenshot from the interactive communication game Façade

First of all, in a large family, the player occupying the living room and shouting at the TV, probably would not be received with great enthusiasm. Communication in the opposite direction is a problem as well. Nowadays we are used to NPCs speaking in voices of professional actors; AI that creates the utterances on its own would have to rely on speech synthesis and in the better case it would sound like a GPS navigation. Speech synthesis is not something new, after all. Even Amiga 500 had it in its operating system and the game Valhalla (creators continue making new episodes keeping the original spirit and as a news they are available for PC– more here) all the characters talked only thanks to speech synthesis as early as in 1994.

Finally we have to expect issues with the content itself. If the AI can get stuck moving from one place to the next, what would it be like if it got stuck in a conversation? Using an independent AI in say a detective L.A. Noire would be a step back in almost all aspects. Instead of realistically acting actors and figuring out their mood from facial expression we could freely chat with a GPS navigation, a voice synthesizer without emotions. It would sometimes say complete nonsense or in the middle of discussion ask “Could you please repeat the question? I did not catch what you’ve just said.”

Screenshots from playing the original Amiga version of the first Valhalla game: Valhalla & The Lord of Infinity

#Uncanny valley or The problem with robotic people

What is a game, anyway? Dutch historian Johan Huizing offers this definition: “A game is a free action or occupation which is governed by voluntarily accepted but unexceptionally binding rules, has a goal in itself and brings a feeling of tension and happiness and also the knowledge of being different from everyday life.”

The last part is extremely important. We like to play games precisely because they are games — they are easier than the real life, give us opportunities to become a hero for a while, which we would not get in a real life and to make it all possible, they help us and shield us from the parts that are not fun. People playing LARP know that even the human players of the characters have to behave predictably and simply so that the game develops as everybody wants it to and it is fun.

The improvements in AI bring another phenomenon called “uncanny valley.” This expression comes from robotics, the author is Masahiro Mori and it stands for the moment when the resemblance of human appearance in robots achieves almost perfection. Instead of being excited, people become repulsed, though, because they stop regarding the replica by robot standards and start to expect it to look like and behave like the original, human. Only after the uncanny valley is traversed and the copy is truly indistinguishable from the original, people will accept the robot.

#Turing test performed by AI

It is not true only for robotics, but for most of human activities that aim to create a replica, including computer graphics or artificial intelligence. A stylised drawing by Josef Lada is more pleasing than a daub trying to resemble a photography. Game graphics is approaching this phase and AI will get there too.

Untill we keep in mind that the NPC is JUST an NPC made of polygons which cannot think and it is there just to show us something, it is all ok. The moment it starts to look too real and starts to think on its own, we will start finding mistakes. It has strange teeth, the face muscles are not moving right, it says complete nonsense, we don’t like the articulation… it is a rubber idiot.

One of the older films by David Cronenberg, Existenz, is a beautiful projection what may games become one day and what it might lead to. The heroes enter a flawless virtual reality and watch how eerie it looks like when the NPC’s AI breaks down if the NPC looks indistinguishably humain or how disgusting it is to shot someones head off in reality, when it is not a stylized visuals on the screen, but the blood is splashing right onto you.

Nice uncanny valley demonstration is the well know 2006 E3 demo The Casting which the developers from Quantic Dream later extended into a nice adventure Heavy Rain. Back then we thought it is amazing, but nowadays even normal NPCs during gameplay look better, not just in cutscenes.

#Thought for the day

And what is the thought of ​​Father Fura? AI is not just about performance and the advent of new hardware is definitely not automatically going to give us games with super realistically behaving NPCs. When these will come, we will realize that this is not what we want, that we prefer the stylized idiots who say only what they need to say and then disappear.

The progress will not stop of course. The challenges are not so much in hardware performance, it is mostly game design problems how to implement intelligent NPCs in game, how to communicate with them and the development in associated fields like speech synthesis. I dare say that’s all gonna take quite a while. The next generation games will probably give use NPCs who may behave slightly more realistic in combat and there may be more of them at one moment in the scene than before. To deliver that you don’t need ingenious programmers, but rather a good design and powerful hardware, because it is not actually AI in the true sense of the word.

The era of super mega ultra realistic AI will probably only start when we dispose with screens and the computer will be “projecting” virtual reality directly into our brains. It may sound like science fiction, but I believe that we have a real chance to see that in the next twenty years. I’m sure it will be amazing, but the question is, whether or not we end as people in the Matrix.

If you started reading this series of articles about AI in games only now, definitely be sure to read the first, second, third, and then again this fourth part.

2 Likes
#29

Another reason probably is that the word “actor” in computing is already taken to mean something else

In comments under the original article there was much talk about this part. People mostly disliked this last section of the article. I think that the idea should’ve gotten more space and be properly introduced.

The way I see it, the difference between books, films and games is this. Moving from books to films, the mantra among creators is “show, don’t tell”. Moving from films to video games, we say “don’t show it, let the player do it”. Writing Lord of the Rings the Book was fairly inexpensive. There was just one guy doing it. Well, he spent decades on it, but he was also doing other things meanwhile. Filming Lord of the Rings the Movie cost a lot more. This is because a lot more has to be delivered to the viewer, moving pictures, instead of words and ideas. The ultimate goal in making good looking and cheap video games is if we could get the player’s brain to work out the graphics for us from minimal inputs. Put in a “book” and let the player see the “movie”, without involving the usual movie production costs.

#30

Being on a meager laptop running Linux, I have seen Alpha only on youtube videos and know as much as I have read here on the forum.

I really like the concept you are describing, but from what I’ve read around here it seems that just the few NPCs in the tiny Samopše are frying the contemporary CPUs quite good. This makes me a bit afraid whether it will be possible to utilize the idea in the final game with the whole map and hundreds (thousands) of NPCs, especially as regards the consoles. Could you shed some lights on the computing requirements of the AI you are producing? Is that an issue that is also on your mind, or do you believe it won’t really be problem?

#31

actually it is an inside joke, more or less. but its not related to the architectural part of coding, more to throwing grenades

about the Uncanny Valley and AI in Games - imho here it is rather problematic to apply, since the issue comes from real life robotics where you perceive the subject of validation in reality. In games, you have the virtuality of the game as a “different optic” to use.

I think computers as we know them will never be capable to project stuff into our brains, since the complexity of such projections are beyond computable means of any near future.

yea, we know about it and it is not the issue of how many are there, but how scheduling and LOD is done. I cannot talk about numbers, since I dont have any late profilings done, but we have some tricks up the sleeve in respect to more complex scheduling and less active more passive approaches to some parts of the AI. We cannot put everything at once into production, due to the fact that it has to be debugged thoroughly and more crazy shit means more crazy debugging.

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