7 ms·

Source: "My friend who works w/ games knows someone who's at CDPR" Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was

by nikanj 5y ago

Source: "My friend who works w/ games knows someone who's at CDPR" Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. The devs tried to explain how absolutely unfeasible that is, but management was convinced it's possible - and would indeed be ground-breaking. After a large number of years of toiling with the problem, the writing on the wall was finally seen. The NPC AI was scrapped and replaced with crude "we'll just spawn the cops around you so they don't have to have a chase mode"-level hacks, to allow them to ship in 2020. Now they're stuck in limbo, because the players are still waiting for those marvellous AI miracles that were promised, but they remain absolutely impossible to deliver. CDPR can patch things like the car physics, but people's expectations were thoroughly mismanaged and they'll forever be disappointed

stared 5y ago
Risking hubris: With current GPT-3 technology (or even GPT-2, accessible by then), it should be possible to create each agent unique. But if the research started earlier, I am not surprised by the dissonance between marketing and devs.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  The release date is not when work on the game starts, it's when work on the game ends.
hericium 5y ago
> Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. They received some AI-related grant[1] from the local government and did whatever they could to avoid penalties. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla-grupy-cd-projekt-innowacje-ramach-programu-gameinn/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla... - original source but in Polish
- Springtime 5y ago
  Found the English version of that source[1]. Seems to have had five criteria[2] with AI being one such. Would be interested if you had a link about the penalties you mention regarding GameINN. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-secures-30-million-pln-gameinn-innovation-funds/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-sec... [2] https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAMEINN-v1-ENG.pdf https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAME...
  - hericium 5y ago
    I have found[1] the government research grant program "Intelligent Development Operational Program for the years 2014-2020" ("Programu Operacyjnego Inteligentny Rozwój 2014- 2020 działanie 1.2") and funding number/code "POIR.01.02.00-00-0105/16" but am Ill-equipped to search surrounding[2] PDFs for penalties. It was, and still is, my assumption that there are penalties. Also, this seems to be another grant - "City Creation" is documented separately[1] and with different amounts from "Animation Excellence", "Cinematic Feel" and "Seamless Multiplayer"[3] [1] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_public/fundusze_europejskie/inteligentny_rozwoj/gameinn/lista_rankingowa_3_1.2_2016_poir__gameinn.pdf https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_... [2] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/programy/fundusze-europejskie/poir/konkursy/konkurs1111-2016/ https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/programy/fundusze-europejskie/p... [3] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_public/fundusze_europejskie/inteligentny_rozwoj/gameinn/gameinn_lista_projektow_zak._do_kol._etapu.pdf https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_...
- Crespyl 5y ago
  What's really weird about it to me is that games like Oblivion and Skyrim were doing sandboxy open world AIs with daily routines over a decade ago. That franchise also had more than its share of bugs, but the AI did more or less work. That CP2077 couldn't even reach that level remains kind of baffling.
  - cobalt 5y ago
ehnto 5y ago
I am not sure what you laid out is unfeasible, but perhaps the way they approached it was unfeasible and left them with no time to iterate or pivot.
- s3tz 5y ago
  CDPR doesn't iterate and test their code in the optimal way. Most of the time they just go at it full on and patch things up at the end. This was (un)fortunately for them a project where the complexity rose so high that their approach couldn't handle it (also covid didn't help), and they were left with intertwined systems that were causing severe performance bottlenecks everywhere (think polynomial or even exponential). AI the way they planned it meant spawning hundreds of NPCs, all interacting with one another and the player, with badly designed systems for that interaction (because why spend upfront time on this if you can floor it), and almost no consideration on how that would impact the graphics and physics sides of the game. The whole development of this game is a case study of how to fail at keeping your externalities in check.
  - moksly 5y ago
    That doesn’t make a lot of sense though. In my country first year CS students build game of life versions with thousands of not millions of individual entities all going about their business and interacting with each other in some shitty math based programming language, using math they typically get from Google because it comes from biology. How can that be a thing of what you say is true?
    - Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
      I would say first, that's the power of exponential complexity. Second, AI in games tends to consist of somewhat complicated goal-based & fuzzy logic behaviors. Third, game AI agents have interactions that take place within a 3d world that has to be modeled accurately. That means lots of expensive computations for things like line of sight, pathfinding, and so on. Finally, given that games are soft real-time and include remarkably expensive 3D rendering, the compute budget available for AI functions I would guess would be somewhere around the order of 2ms per frame (on a 16.7 ms frame, for 60fps). Though, two through four can usually be handled without issue, provided the devs know what they're doing & architect the engine correctly. (edit: And keep the scope in check, which ultimately is the responsibility of the leadership.) Unfortunately, this appears to be where #1 messed things up for them.
onion2k 5y ago
Most players just want a decent looking, mostly bug free, interesting Witcher-3-but-it's-Cyberpunk game.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  Exactly. I don't expect to be able to follow an NPC and see a life-like routine, just something convincing enough.
madmax108 5y ago
LOL, this reminds of an episode of Mythic Quest where the lead engineer (Poppy) imagines "real-time, persistent, globally-reflected environment changes" for the MMO they built, gets told that it's unfeasible by the entire dev team, mows ahead anyway and ends up with a disastrous demo at the end when the system basically collapses on itself. Funny how reel-life and real-life collide into each other! :D --- As an aside, after Ted Lasso (which gets all the well-deserved hype), Mythic Quest is a great trope-filled show esp. for anyone who's worked in tech in general (and game dev specifically).
- taberiand 5y ago
  Sounds vaguely inspired by Ultima Online
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  I’m a developer, though not in game dev. This sounds feasible, what am I missing?
  - Quarrelsome 5y ago
    I'm guessing you'd need Discord level tech to propagate changes in a multiplayer environment which is a bit of a distance from "core competencies".
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    A game today which is struggling to accomplish this is Star Citizen, and they did a video on what they plan to do here: https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU Anyways, I think the big challenge compared to real time apps like Google docs is that game simulation is significantly more complex than synchronizing bits of text. One problem is that at a minimum, you have the round trip to the server as latency between “submit command” and “receive simulation result”. And this has to happen many times per second so that it looks realistic. And then on the server, it has to be processing the changes from N connected players M times per second, and then simulate what happens in the universe. And if simulation (M) drops too low, you get desync problems where players are rubber-banding and the AI gets very dumb. (An example is that star citizen appears to have great AI in demos, but in the live server, the servers can’t process changes fast enough for the AI to work well.) And then, if you want a lot of connected players or a big universe, this just gets more and more complex, and you’ll eventually out-grow the ability of a single server to process changes. At which point you also need to handled data replication among multiple servers. For example, star citizen game servers don’t have capacity for more planets at the moment, either because of memory or cpu constraints. So sharding the universe into multiple servers is a pre-req for the next stage. So to more directly answer your question, it’s definitely possible to implement. Many games have basic versions working. Minecraft is an example, but it can’t scale to hundreds/thousands of players. New World is another recent example, but even its servers have player caps. No Man’s Sky is sort of an example, but it keeps players spread out so that they rarely encounter each other. Eve Online is also an example, but I think it reduces the amount of nitty-gritty simulation details. (So it might not have a very in-depth physics simulation, or first-person-level details.) So it’s basically a scaling problem, and even then still has limitations based on the speed of light (for internet latency) which limit how good it can get.
ljm 5y ago
That's amusing because a game like Deadly Premonition managed to pull that off in a decently convincing way. We're not talking about hundreds or thousands of NPCs, of course, but everyone had a daily routine that they went about and the various places in town had opening hours. Most of the story would only progress if you were in the right place at the right time. Not the most polished game but easily the best murder mystery and Twin Peaks style life sim I've ever played. So if CDPR couldn't pull it off, they must have been asked to do it at an unreasonable scale or the requirements themselves were unreasonable.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  A lot of other games (the first one that comes to my mind is Zelda:BotW) also have NPC routines, opening hours etc. but if you look closer it's just a simple O(1) mapping between time ranges and expected state. It gets much more complicated when you actually try to pull off NPCs that may decide to do different things based on their modeled traits, react to in-world events or player actions etc. which I assume is what grandparent was talking about.
wikidani 5y ago
>Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc There's a similar system on the stalker saga and maybe they could have built upon it? Of course making every NPC do it for itself instead of a sort of hive mind (I don't have a better term for it) sounds very difficult but sounds rather weird that they can't do some sort of similar implementation, right?
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  They can make it work in a barren hellscape with less than a hundred characters, but not in a bustling urban setting as densely populated as Manhattan, I wouldn't call that weird at all.
kingcharles 5y ago
> Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. I tried this on a limited scale in a text-based MUD in the 90s, and even then it quickly became an ungodly nightmare. What sounds good in your head isn't always feasible in reality.

by nikanj 5y ago

stared 5y ago

Risking hubris: With current GPT-3 technology (or even GPT-2, accessible by then), it should be possible to create each agent unique. But if the research started earlier, I am not surprised by the dissonance between marketing and devs.

jjoonathan 5y ago
The release date is not when work on the game starts, it's when work on the game ends.

hericium 5y ago

> Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. They received some AI-related grant[1] from the local government and did whatever they could to avoid penalties. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla-grupy-cd-projekt-innowacje-ramach-programu-gameinn/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla... - original source but in Polish

Springtime 5y ago
Found the English version of that source[1]. Seems to have had five criteria[2] with AI being one such. Would be interested if you had a link about the penalties you mention regarding GameINN. [1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-secures-30-million-pln-gameinn-innovation-funds/ https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-sec... [2] https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAMEINN-v1-ENG.pdf https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAME...
- hericium 5y ago
  I have found[1] the government research grant program "Intelligent Development Operational Program for the years 2014-2020" ("Programu Operacyjnego Inteligentny Rozwój 2014- 2020 działanie 1.2") and funding number/code "POIR.01.02.00-00-0105/16" but am Ill-equipped to search surrounding[2] PDFs for penalties. It was, and still is, my assumption that there are penalties. Also, this seems to be another grant - "City Creation" is documented separately[1] and with different amounts from "Animation Excellence", "Cinematic Feel" and "Seamless Multiplayer"[3] [1] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_public/fundusze_europejskie/inteligentny_rozwoj/gameinn/lista_rankingowa_3_1.2_2016_poir__gameinn.pdf https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_... [2] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/programy/fundusze-europejskie/poir/konkursy/konkurs1111-2016/ https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/programy/fundusze-europejskie/p... [3] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_public/fundusze_europejskie/inteligentny_rozwoj/gameinn/gameinn_lista_projektow_zak._do_kol._etapu.pdf https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_...
Crespyl 5y ago
What's really weird about it to me is that games like Oblivion and Skyrim were doing sandboxy open world AIs with daily routines over a decade ago. That franchise also had more than its share of bugs, but the AI did more or less work. That CP2077 couldn't even reach that level remains kind of baffling.
- cobalt 5y ago

ehnto 5y ago

I am not sure what you laid out is unfeasible, but perhaps the way they approached it was unfeasible and left them with no time to iterate or pivot.

s3tz 5y ago
CDPR doesn't iterate and test their code in the optimal way. Most of the time they just go at it full on and patch things up at the end. This was (un)fortunately for them a project where the complexity rose so high that their approach couldn't handle it (also covid didn't help), and they were left with intertwined systems that were causing severe performance bottlenecks everywhere (think polynomial or even exponential). AI the way they planned it meant spawning hundreds of NPCs, all interacting with one another and the player, with badly designed systems for that interaction (because why spend upfront time on this if you can floor it), and almost no consideration on how that would impact the graphics and physics sides of the game. The whole development of this game is a case study of how to fail at keeping your externalities in check.
- moksly 5y ago
  That doesn’t make a lot of sense though. In my country first year CS students build game of life versions with thousands of not millions of individual entities all going about their business and interacting with each other in some shitty math based programming language, using math they typically get from Google because it comes from biology. How can that be a thing of what you say is true?
  - Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
    I would say first, that's the power of exponential complexity. Second, AI in games tends to consist of somewhat complicated goal-based & fuzzy logic behaviors. Third, game AI agents have interactions that take place within a 3d world that has to be modeled accurately. That means lots of expensive computations for things like line of sight, pathfinding, and so on. Finally, given that games are soft real-time and include remarkably expensive 3D rendering, the compute budget available for AI functions I would guess would be somewhere around the order of 2ms per frame (on a 16.7 ms frame, for 60fps). Though, two through four can usually be handled without issue, provided the devs know what they're doing & architect the engine correctly. (edit: And keep the scope in check, which ultimately is the responsibility of the leadership.) Unfortunately, this appears to be where #1 messed things up for them.

onion2k 5y ago

Most players just want a decent looking, mostly bug free, interesting Witcher-3-but-it's-Cyberpunk game.

m-p-3 5y ago
Exactly. I don't expect to be able to follow an NPC and see a life-like routine, just something convincing enough.

madmax108 5y ago

LOL, this reminds of an episode of Mythic Quest where the lead engineer (Poppy) imagines "real-time, persistent, globally-reflected environment changes" for the MMO they built, gets told that it's unfeasible by the entire dev team, mows ahead anyway and ends up with a disastrous demo at the end when the system basically collapses on itself. Funny how reel-life and real-life collide into each other! :D --- As an aside, after Ted Lasso (which gets all the well-deserved hype), Mythic Quest is a great trope-filled show esp. for anyone who's worked in tech in general (and game dev specifically).

taberiand 5y ago
Sounds vaguely inspired by Ultima Online
danielvaughn 5y ago
I’m a developer, though not in game dev. This sounds feasible, what am I missing?
- Quarrelsome 5y ago
  I'm guessing you'd need Discord level tech to propagate changes in a multiplayer environment which is a bit of a distance from "core competencies".
- noahtallen 5y ago
  A game today which is struggling to accomplish this is Star Citizen, and they did a video on what they plan to do here: https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU Anyways, I think the big challenge compared to real time apps like Google docs is that game simulation is significantly more complex than synchronizing bits of text. One problem is that at a minimum, you have the round trip to the server as latency between “submit command” and “receive simulation result”. And this has to happen many times per second so that it looks realistic. And then on the server, it has to be processing the changes from N connected players M times per second, and then simulate what happens in the universe. And if simulation (M) drops too low, you get desync problems where players are rubber-banding and the AI gets very dumb. (An example is that star citizen appears to have great AI in demos, but in the live server, the servers can’t process changes fast enough for the AI to work well.) And then, if you want a lot of connected players or a big universe, this just gets more and more complex, and you’ll eventually out-grow the ability of a single server to process changes. At which point you also need to handled data replication among multiple servers. For example, star citizen game servers don’t have capacity for more planets at the moment, either because of memory or cpu constraints. So sharding the universe into multiple servers is a pre-req for the next stage. So to more directly answer your question, it’s definitely possible to implement. Many games have basic versions working. Minecraft is an example, but it can’t scale to hundreds/thousands of players. New World is another recent example, but even its servers have player caps. No Man’s Sky is sort of an example, but it keeps players spread out so that they rarely encounter each other. Eve Online is also an example, but I think it reduces the amount of nitty-gritty simulation details. (So it might not have a very in-depth physics simulation, or first-person-level details.) So it’s basically a scaling problem, and even then still has limitations based on the speed of light (for internet latency) which limit how good it can get.

ljm 5y ago

That's amusing because a game like Deadly Premonition managed to pull that off in a decently convincing way. We're not talking about hundreds or thousands of NPCs, of course, but everyone had a daily routine that they went about and the various places in town had opening hours. Most of the story would only progress if you were in the right place at the right time. Not the most polished game but easily the best murder mystery and Twin Peaks style life sim I've ever played. So if CDPR couldn't pull it off, they must have been asked to do it at an unreasonable scale or the requirements themselves were unreasonable.

seba_dos1 5y ago
A lot of other games (the first one that comes to my mind is Zelda:BotW) also have NPC routines, opening hours etc. but if you look closer it's just a simple O(1) mapping between time ranges and expected state. It gets much more complicated when you actually try to pull off NPCs that may decide to do different things based on their modeled traits, react to in-world events or player actions etc. which I assume is what grandparent was talking about.

wikidani 5y ago

>Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc There's a similar system on the stalker saga and maybe they could have built upon it? Of course making every NPC do it for itself instead of a sort of hive mind (I don't have a better term for it) sounds very difficult but sounds rather weird that they can't do some sort of similar implementation, right?

addingnumbers 5y ago
They can make it work in a barren hellscape with less than a hundred characters, but not in a bustling urban setting as densely populated as Manhattan, I wouldn't call that weird at all.

kingcharles 5y ago

> Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc. I tried this on a limited scale in a text-based MUD in the 90s, and even then it quickly became an ungodly nightmare. What sounds good in your head isn't always feasible in reality.