Artificial Intelligence in games

[Vic]

Coupled with the death of community servers, it's not surprising that people would rather play against bots.

That’s sad.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Ignoring the fact that the OP primarily mentions single player games, metafaggotry has become much more common in multiplayer games over the years. More and more players are watching Youtube videos telling them which units and buildings to create down to the second in RTS games, they're memorizing which pixel of a cloud they need to align their crosshair on to throw flashbangs in FPSs, and I've even seen players temporarily banned from mass-reports because they chose a sub-optimal character. Coupled with the death of community servers, it's not surprising that people would rather play against bots.

He said that AI is trying to emulate real players, this makes no sense, if you take a MMO game, players are grinding and doing gear hunting on their own and following a guide online, barely interacting with others players outside of their group. Almost nobody is playing it as a social experience and if you give full freedom to the players they would just keep murdering each other, like in GTA online. The MMO promise of an immersive social experience in a living world where players would interact with it and change it did not realize, it's just a shallow grindy experience: "wow i hit level 60! after 10 hours of killing the same mobs, so fun!" fuck MMOs.

We want the opposite in a single player game, we want dynamic NPCs and a world that feels immersive, you can not do that with real players unfortunately, it becomes a mess, but it AI you can.

In Strategy games we want a AI that feels dynamic and unpredictable, that knows how to use diplomancy, to manage their empires, have their own quirks and to provide a decent challenging. This all adds replayability to game. But we do not want an AI that abuse the same meta/overpowered strategies(Earth Magic in Heroes 3 as an example).

 

[Nutmeg]

But we do not want an AI that abuse the same meta/overpowered strategies(Earth Magic in Heroes 3 as an example).

"We don't want challenge and want game designers keep designing broken games"

Don't you think it would be better to have a smart AI (smartness adjustable via difficulty mode) and a non broken game?

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Don't you think it would be better to have a smart AI (smartness adjustable via difficulty mode) and a non broken game?

Yes and where i said it would not?

 

[Nutmeg]

Don't you think it would be better to have a smart AI (smartness adjustable via difficulty mode) and a non broken game?

Yes and where i said it would not?

AI should exploit broken strategies if they exist. It shouldn't avoid doing so.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

AI should exploit broken strategies if they exist. It shouldn't avoid doing so.

To do that, first the designers would have to know that this strategy is broken, i don't think the devs of Heroes III knew that Earth Magic was broken, i had 50h in the game and i did not, until i saw someone commenting about it online. Most Devs do not have 50 hours to spent testing the game to fix balance issues, they are more worried about bugs.

And if they did happen to know, earlier or later, they would've try to rebalance it with a patch instead of changing the AI to use the broken strat. So your comment makes not much sense at all, AI does not discover new strategies, it's scripted to behave in a way, the only way to an AI to abuse broken strats, it's to be scripted to abuse the broken strats, why not just fix the broken strats instead?

 

[Nutmeg]

AI does not discover strategies

This isn't true. Modern AI isn't "hard coded" so to speak. Or do you think ChatGPT is "scripted" to have a response to everything someone might ask it? ANN based AIs (famously DeepMind's game playing AIs) very much so can discover strategies by themselves.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

AI does not discover strategies

This isn't true. Modern AI isn't "hard coded" so to speak. Or do you think ChatGPT is "scripted" to have a response to everything someone might ask it? ANN based AIs (famously DeepMind's game playing AIs) very much so can discover strategies by themselves.

I mean, what single player games use this type of AI that i can play right now? from what i know, those AIs are run on a server from a multibillion dollar company. They are more of a project/test than something made from the devs to be in a game, and i heard they cost a lot of money, i already posted a video about the Starcraft AlphaStar AI, that cost million of dollars to DeepMind. So what games?

 

[Nutmeg]

We are talking about what kind of future AI we want, not current. If it already existed, we wouldn't want it, we would have it.

those AIs are run on a server from a multibillion dollar company. They are more of a project/test

Running even very large models can be done on consumer hardware. Training them on the other hand is a different story. In the future, if developers are educated and competent, they can distribute training to player's systems.

and i heard they cost a lot of money

A good GOFAI (basically a more sophisticated version of what you call "scripting") will also cost a lot of money. The costs aren't due to the "servers" or whatever, they're due to the shortage of the kind of highly, highly skilled labor required.

As for what *cheap* game designer labor can produce with built-in knowledge ad-hoc heuristic based systems and what that can accomplish? Well the state of the art has been in games for the last 40 years.

 

[Naraya]

According to Todd Howard

 

[dreughjiggers]

Yes, the liar himself, but it sounds dumb (smart?) enough to be radiant ai behavior. Its basically what goblins do; if you steal their wizard staffs, they go looking them. If an npc is told it needs an item another npc has, it will either kill the npc or die stealing it. What if the chests in dungeons aren't locked, and npcs allowed to look for the best gear? The npcs will open every container, equipping the good gear and leaving nothing for the player (which was what loot in Oblivion felt like, anyway). The radiant stuff wasn't really Oblivion's problem, that was the only interesting thing Oblivion had going for it, the problem was BGS evidently didn't know how to use those behaviors. Probably had to do with Todd's game philosophy, making the player the center of the universe.

 

[Vic]

Somebody got triggered.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

I mean you deserved it, plus you did the same.

 

[dreughjiggers]

 

[Norfleet]

y to rebalance it with a patch instead of changing the AI to use the broken strat. So your comment makes not much sense at all, AI does not discover new strategies, it's scripted to behave in a way, the only way to an AI to abuse broken strats, it's to be scripted to abuse the broken strats, why not just fix the broken strats instead?

Well, TRADITIONAL game AI, which is really just a simple script, doesn't. Advanced new neutral-net AI actually WOULD learn to exploit things, as AI researchers often find, where the AI learns to exploit bugs in its test environment.

 

[Tweed]

People don't want smart AI, imagine playing Thief and the guards notice Bob goes missing from his patrol. Once they can't find him they'll raise the alarm, close the gates, and start sweeping room by room. None of that has anything to do with omnipotence or perfect accuracy, just common sense which most video game bad guys don't possess.

 

[Gostak]

[...]

AI is extremely underdeveloped in games. In my opinions for three major reasons.
1. It’s not ‘worth it’ for advertisements since you cannot show the AI before a game’s release: Screenshots are static, trailers are short and focus on action. Therefore you cannot build hype based on AI at all.
2. Players don’t care about AI. People often discuss graphics, stories, atmosphere or quests, but I find it extremely rare that an AI is discussed. Players are engaged in a game due to fluid or challenging combat, fascinating stories or atmosphere i.e. of a horror. AI? It doesn’t happen.
3. Money. I have no idea, but I guess developing AI is much more complex than most other game features. It would need lots of work, and therefore investment. Gaming companies usually don’t pay well in comparison to IT, but require similar skills. Somebody who could develop a good AI will likely move to an IT company that pays much better.

In consequence there were few attempts to develop a decent AI in games. By ‘decent AI’ I mean an AI that attempts to adapt to the situation in some ways. [...]


Well, that's just my random thoughts about it, I'd be interested in hearing your opinions and especially about other examples of attempts at creating a decent AI in games that isn't there just to interact with the player and that's it.

To begin with "AI" to me only begins where sufficiently big ANNs come into play.
The rest, even e.g. the cool GOAP method, is just faking it with deterministic algorithms which make the behaviour potentially
utterly predictable by attentive players.

There you'd get my reason zero for it:
This (ANNs) was (/were) kind of an underdeveloped niche thing till not too long ago where
that field of deep-/ machine learning began to make great strides.


"1." I'd argue in longer videos or interviews you could advertise AI and even with just a few sentences tell how it might benefit the playing experience (whether people would "buy" such claims is another thing).
However the best way would be a demo.

"2." Quite a few players do, it might just not yet be the majority. However with how splintered and saturated the games scene/ market has become it might become a more popular thing to be wished for in games.

Well, that's just my random thoughts about it, I'd be interested in hearing your opinions and especially about other examples of attempts at creating a decent AI in games that isn't there just to interact with the player and that's it.

Aren't they all? (No worries I get what you mean there.)

I have no good examples of that and again it does not match my definition of "AI".

Matching mine (somewhat, because these are not sufficiently big for my definition IMO, just for their respective purposes they seem sufficiently sized):
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/32369/modern-art-computer-game-w-ai-available-download (archive.org still holds that I think, as should other sources)

https://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?ut2

 

[BLOBERT]

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't FEAR's AI complexity just the product of the devs planning for most actions that the player might make in a given area?
Isn't it even why the game is mostly set in linear tight spaces - to make it easier for the devs to account for player's strategies?

BRO THATS THE BEST AI

ONE THAT FITS THE DEMANDS OF THE GAME

FEAR AI DOESNT NEED TO PASD A TURING TEDT IT JUST NEEDS TO MAKE THE GAME MORE FUN

 

[dreughjiggers]

Didn't Return to Castle Wolfenstein's nazis regroup or hide if their buddies were killed?

 

[Gostak]

If anyone requests the weights and tries it please let me know what resources you need for one AI player.
You'd need to run six or so for an enjoyable game.

 

[oblivionenjoyer]

They toned down Radiant AI in Oblivion because the NPCs were doing odd unexpected things - I think there was a famous example where hunters would kill a deer, one would take the meat from the deer's corpse, and then the rest of the hunters would attack him, identifying him as a deer because he had deer meat in his inventory.

That's not to say that the unchained version of Radiant AI would have been impressive - if anything, it'd just be more fucky than the version included in the released game - but it was a pretty cool idea for NPCs to have dynamic shedules, especially if you're a thief character who wants to learn when people will be out of their houses and such (not that it matters since there's no actual consequences for breaking into people's houses other than being told to leave).

Learning NPC schedules to rob their houses etc. IS in the released game and it's even referenced in quests. In the Thieves Guild in the first quest they tell you and the other thieves when a mark probably won't be home, and then the other thieves actually arrive there at that time. So you literally cannot miss that this is a feature of the game, unless you're a Morrowind fanboy looking for any bullshit excuse to shit on Oblivion.

As for the "no consequences to breaking in", obviously there are consequences--you have to GTFO before the guards are called. Just like IRL???

The radiant AI was the best thing about Oblivion:



this is incline, might look cringe but in what other game you have a non scripted bar fight?

In open world games, it's good to have an AI that react and interact with things in a way that was not planned to, take Gothic vs Morrowind as a example, i might be wrong about this because i played them long time ago but i think in Gothic i could lure strong monsters and have the guards/civilians kill them, or they would die and them i would finish the monsters with low HP and loot the dead guards. In Morrowind the guards ignore the monsters and just stand there doing nothing, but i might be wrong. I think in Gothic human enemies would climb stuff too when chasing you, but i don't remember correctly if it's Gothic or other game that enemies do that. These random interactions with the AI makes the game more dynamic and fun.

I think there are two kinds of open world RPG, the party based isometric one and the one person third or first person one, AI of NPCs in the former really does not matter much, i never thought Baldur's Gate or Fallout 1 and 2 needs complex AI or interactions, the NPCs there are just quest givers that stand there doing nothing. Then there's the Elder Scrolls, Gothic, Fallout 3/NV/ ones where random interactions with the NPCs enhances the games, that's why i think these games are kinda of an immersive sim. I would put Morrowind in the former(NPCs are dead quest givers) and Ultima in the latter.

Good stealth games usually have good AI, since the entire genre is designed around the AI, if you fuck up the AI in a stealth game you fuck up the game. Of this genre i've played Thief and Metal Gear, they have good AI, the enemies react to a lot of things and you could manipulate them in a lot of ways and it does not feel like bullshit when they spot you. I don't remember if Deus Ex had good or bad AI.

That's another thing about Oblivion: if people liked you enough, or were immorally minded, they'd side with you against the guards. Or, for example, if a Thieves Guild member saw you rob something, you wouldn't get a bounty.

 

[Dadd]

Artificial intelligence was always a myth.

The focus should have always been on clever scripting and trying to "fool" the player into thinking the AI was smart instead of trying to make the AI actually smart and end up with janky radiant shit, which is always terrible.

Lots of butthurt babies reacting to this post but it's true and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

 

[Naraya]

Oblivion was again a precursor of the incline and that's a FACT.

 

[Lemming42]

Learning NPC schedules to rob their houses etc. IS in the released game and it's even referenced in quests. In the Thieves Guild in the first quest they tell you and the other thieves when a mark probably won't be home, and then the other thieves actually arrive their at that time. So you literally cannot miss that this is a feature of the game, unless you're a Morrowind fanboy looking for any bullshit excuse to shit on Oblivion.

You've misread my intent, but it's 100% my fault for writing my post so badly - I meant to say that Oblivion's attempts at Radiant AI, even in neutered form, were admirable and something the game can hold over other instalments in the Elder Scrolls series (especially Morrowind, which is undermined constantly by how static and unreactive it is) and something Skyrim should have sought to expand on rather than water down further. I'm aware that this feature is in the game, and I played as a thief character in my recent playthrough, hence me saying that there's no consequence for breaking into people's houses.

There are no consequences to breaking in though; people bound over to you at light speed and ask you to leave, then you leave and come back again the next night (or again the same night). I don't know if it affects their disposition towards you or anything, but it feels pretty consequence-free, I just broke into anywhere I wanted with gay abandon and never feared being caught, since the penalty is to turn around and leave.

 

[Azdul]

Oblivion was again a precursor of the incline and that's a FACT.

Initial plans for Oblivion (before Morrowind was in production) were really ambitious - and that included AI.

Jim Goblin and goblin tribes emergent gameplay is one of the few remnants of that design. They were left - because they could not break 'muh story'.

The best mods for Oblivion try to build upon that framework - instead of trying to tell the story.

Of course once the design started leaning towards classic CRPG design with quests, storylines, cutscenes and voiced dialog - smart AI started to be an obstacle - not a strength.

Game with proper AI needs to be designed from the ground up as such - and quest designers and voice actors need not apply. The only story that can be allowed is a backstory.

 

[Konjad]

Oblivion was again a precursor of the incline and that's a FACT.

Oblivion did this one thing right, and everybody ignored it or made fun of it