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To me AI is what is holding back video games the most. The graphics have advanced incredibly in the last 20 years, but the AI seems to be increasing on a logari

by gman83 5y ago

To me AI is what is holding back video games the most. The graphics have advanced incredibly in the last 20 years, but the AI seems to be increasing on a logarithmic scale.

o_m 5y ago
I believe it is a game design decision. We've had human like bots/AI in FPS games for over 20 years. It might be that most players enjoy the predictable patterns a simple game AI provides.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Right. A game has to be fun above all. Players want enough AI to keep things immersive but not so smart that it breaks the flow by being too hard to pass.
  - AlecSchueler 5y ago
    But people still enjoy playing multiplayer for the added challenge.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - antifa 5y ago
      Bad AIs can really break immersion, for example in one of the Settlers of Catan games they'll refuse to trade with non-AI players. In civ5 harder AIs just get random levels of free stuff but otherwise are still rather dumb.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      In FPS, most of the people playing are also bad, but their behaviors can be coherent. The enjoyable part is the random nature of your opponents and the context of the conflicts.
- eutectic 5y ago
  I suspect there's a sort of uncanny valley, where beyond a certain point bots become too complex to predict but too stupid to be interesting. With deep learning maybe we have a hope to reach the other side where AI can add value.
- antifa 5y ago
  AI could use a lot of immersive improvements, there is a lot of low hanging fruit above "hard mode enemies have 4x HP" or "the easy AI is an aimbot with a slightly longer reaction delay".
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Nobody has invented effective programmatic mechanisms/patterns for general decision-making anywhere between if-else state machines and neural nets. The former becomes unmanageable spaghetti and the latter gives no theatrical guarantees. So we're stuck in a kind of AI limbo. Efforts exist in beating humans in specific games like chess; these games are often symmetric, i.e. all players compete on fair ground, and the AIs aim to replace human players. But most games don't want this! Most games seek theatrical asymmetry in computer-controlled agents. Most games want the illusion of cleverness without actually being clever, because most players don't want their gaming experience interrupted by undefeatable killer robots. Most games are power fantasies. I posit that what we actually want is simply some programming pattern for managing complexity in autonomous theatrical agents. Some way to organize the creative will of the game designer easily enough that it democratizes independent developers to craft interesting behaviors. I've got my own ideas but they're as of yet unproven.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  Unity is pushing for Reinforcement Learning, with the necessary mechanisms for training, built into the engine. That seems like a reasonable first step imho.
- Certified 5y ago
  Fuzzy Logic as used my Massive might be what you are looking for
- 0thgen 5y ago
  it would certainly make MMOs a little more interesting if raids actually required outthinking an intelligent machine as oppose to exploiting it's preprogrammed responses via rote trial and error
  - kroltan 5y ago
    Not raids, but World of Warcraft's "Isand Expeditions" feature, introduced around 2018, does this. They use an AI trained on PvP player behaviour, so the NPCs jump around, respond to teammates being injured, try to catch you off-rotation, etc. In my opinion, it wouldn't work for bosses though, as part of the fun is exactly about understanding the tells and patterns. If you want to fight against intelligent enemies, just play PvP! I think if you play without addons like BigWigs/DeadlyBossMods you'll have much more fun, if what you're looking for is unpredictability. Plus, would there really be that much of a difference between a machine-learned approach and a decision tree when every action the boss can perform needs to be pre-programmed anyway, and have predefined ranges/optimal uses? Maybe a different game could combine that with something like Magicka, where there are spell "recipes" which can be combined, so the AI would have more options to play with. Another example is things like Dark Souls, the bosses are so engaging to its players _because_ you can learn to understand how they respond to your positioning. If they were a moving target, there would be no point in doing anything but learning the animations for each attack so you can dodge, so in the end they would be _less_ intellectually engaging.
aqme28 5y ago
I feel like it must be intentional. The original Far Cry AI is far better than anything coming out these days.
rightbyte 5y ago
Getting better? The original Half Life had better AI than HL 2. Should be more examples.
- jl6 5y ago
  Did it? Or did it have better scripting?
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    HL1 had AI waypoints manually made by the level designer. If I remember correctly the human grunts were smarter, like covering eachother and stuff. (I am not 100% sure though. Was my initial thought when playing HL2)
    - AeroNotix 5y ago
      HL2 enemies especially the Combine Soldiers would zerg at you in single file. The marines in HL1 were way better than that. The ninja people were better still..
      - rightbyte 5y ago
        Ye good someone agrees I started to falter. From my limited HL1 modding experience, good waypoints were key for grunts. It probably made the AI way simpler to program with better results -- maybe an unsexy expert system -- which ended up better than the fancy general approuch. Wild guess
- fullstop 5y ago
  Enemy forces in The Division 2 were pretty clever. They cover each other, attempt to flank you, etc. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/designing-the-enemy-ai-of-the-division-2 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/designing-the-enem... There's definitely a balance between "real" and "fun".
0thgen 5y ago
could it also in part be to the fact that graphics can be parallelized on GPUs, and AI behavior is inherently serial? (and beyond perceptual tasks like vision, does modern AI benefit from GPUs that much?)
spywaregorilla 5y ago
That's not what you want at all. An AI can easily have perfect aim in a shooter game. Designers need to handicap them to be fun. The same goes for many dimensions of games. You could make AI more competent but its usually less fun. Even strategy games designed content usually come from you beating an opponent with a superior starting position. What you really want is more immersive AI. Not in terms of the intelligence, but in the ability to do actions that interact with the environment. But this usually requires one off animation and gameplay coding so its not something that can scale easily. Things like hiding under something form a large enemy and thinking "he can't get me" but then, oh shit, turns out he is capable of crawling.
- tweakimp 5y ago
  I think what he meant was a realistic AI, a perfect game logic for the role it needs to play, not a perfect solution for the task it does. Example: I want to have an AI for a monkey that behaves like a monkey would behave. And if that monkey sits in a drivers seat, I want the car to move like a monkey would drive, not like a perfect driver of cars.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    But the issue isn't the AI, it's the interface that the AI has to the game. Monkey drivers is a little absurd so let's stick to monkeys in the forest. A real monkey would probably climb the trees. But if the game doesn't have climbing mechanics, then its unlikely that the game devs are going to implement them just so that the monkeys can do this. Making a behavior tree to utilize available actions is pretty easy to do. It's the implementation of the animations, game logic, and environment to allow such things to happen. Little things like letting an actor turn its head to look at things will make the AI feel more alive than a more advanced algorithm for behavior. And you definitely won't see any particular gains by trying to solve it with ML brains.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> An AI can easily have perfect aim in a shooter game. I wouldn't mind that. I would be fine with an opponent like Scar in BSG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_(Battlestar_Galactica) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_(Battlestar_Galactica) Something that's actually smart and really, really not just there for you to kill, for once.
roland35 5y ago
I enjoyed the AI in Perfect Dark (N64), you could create a battle with a wide assortment of personalities (bot-alities?) like vengeance-bot (always out for revenge) or turtle-bot (try to get armor and hiding).
jstream67 5y ago
you should play the original FEAR if you haven't already. It has the best FPS bot AI that I can recall seeing. Part of it is that the AI often shouts out what they are doing so you get a better idea of their decision making process. It is a really great game.
xibbie 5y ago
Alien Isolation had some very in-depth AI governing the behaviour of the protagonist, and it really showed in gameplay. Getting the feeling you're being actively stalked by a sentient creature is legitimately terrifying, and it's the first time I've felt scared by the intelligence of a game's AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7d5lF6U0eQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7d5lF6U0eQ goes into some detail on the decision paths governing the AI.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Getting the feeling you're being actively stalked by a sentient creature is legitimately terrifying, and it's the first time I've felt scared by the intelligence of a game's AI. I've heard that the easier difficulty is scarier, because the alien appears less often so when it does it's more terrifying.
zkldi 5y ago
I actually don't think videogame AI has gotten much better since Halo 1. Maybe that game was just incredibly ahead of the curve, or that's as good as we can do.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
munificent 5y ago
Stupid games make players feel smart. Smart games make players feel stupid. Players like to feel smart.

by gman83 5y ago

To me AI is what is holding back video games the most. The graphics have advanced incredibly in the last 20 years, but the AI seems to be increasing on a logarithmic scale.

o_m 5y ago

I believe it is a game design decision. We've had human like bots/AI in FPS games for over 20 years. It might be that most players enjoy the predictable patterns a simple game AI provides.

mysterydip 5y ago
Right. A game has to be fun above all. Players want enough AI to keep things immersive but not so smart that it breaks the flow by being too hard to pass.
- AlecSchueler 5y ago
  But people still enjoy playing multiplayer for the added challenge.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - antifa 5y ago
    Bad AIs can really break immersion, for example in one of the Settlers of Catan games they'll refuse to trade with non-AI players. In civ5 harder AIs just get random levels of free stuff but otherwise are still rather dumb.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    In FPS, most of the people playing are also bad, but their behaviors can be coherent. The enjoyable part is the random nature of your opponents and the context of the conflicts.
eutectic 5y ago
I suspect there's a sort of uncanny valley, where beyond a certain point bots become too complex to predict but too stupid to be interesting. With deep learning maybe we have a hope to reach the other side where AI can add value.
antifa 5y ago
AI could use a lot of immersive improvements, there is a lot of low hanging fruit above "hard mode enemies have 4x HP" or "the easy AI is an aimbot with a slightly longer reaction delay".

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

Nobody has invented effective programmatic mechanisms/patterns for general decision-making anywhere between if-else state machines and neural nets. The former becomes unmanageable spaghetti and the latter gives no theatrical guarantees. So we're stuck in a kind of AI limbo. Efforts exist in beating humans in specific games like chess; these games are often symmetric, i.e. all players compete on fair ground, and the AIs aim to replace human players. But most games don't want this! Most games seek theatrical asymmetry in computer-controlled agents. Most games want the illusion of cleverness without actually being clever, because most players don't want their gaming experience interrupted by undefeatable killer robots. Most games are power fantasies. I posit that what we actually want is simply some programming pattern for managing complexity in autonomous theatrical agents. Some way to organize the creative will of the game designer easily enough that it democratizes independent developers to craft interesting behaviors. I've got my own ideas but they're as of yet unproven.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
Unity is pushing for Reinforcement Learning, with the necessary mechanisms for training, built into the engine. That seems like a reasonable first step imho.
Certified 5y ago
Fuzzy Logic as used my Massive might be what you are looking for
0thgen 5y ago
it would certainly make MMOs a little more interesting if raids actually required outthinking an intelligent machine as oppose to exploiting it's preprogrammed responses via rote trial and error
- kroltan 5y ago
  Not raids, but World of Warcraft's "Isand Expeditions" feature, introduced around 2018, does this. They use an AI trained on PvP player behaviour, so the NPCs jump around, respond to teammates being injured, try to catch you off-rotation, etc. In my opinion, it wouldn't work for bosses though, as part of the fun is exactly about understanding the tells and patterns. If you want to fight against intelligent enemies, just play PvP! I think if you play without addons like BigWigs/DeadlyBossMods you'll have much more fun, if what you're looking for is unpredictability. Plus, would there really be that much of a difference between a machine-learned approach and a decision tree when every action the boss can perform needs to be pre-programmed anyway, and have predefined ranges/optimal uses? Maybe a different game could combine that with something like Magicka, where there are spell "recipes" which can be combined, so the AI would have more options to play with. Another example is things like Dark Souls, the bosses are so engaging to its players _because_ you can learn to understand how they respond to your positioning. If they were a moving target, there would be no point in doing anything but learning the animations for each attack so you can dodge, so in the end they would be _less_ intellectually engaging.

aqme28 5y ago

I feel like it must be intentional. The original Far Cry AI is far better than anything coming out these days.

rightbyte 5y ago

Getting better? The original Half Life had better AI than HL 2. Should be more examples.

jl6 5y ago
Did it? Or did it have better scripting?
- rightbyte 5y ago
  HL1 had AI waypoints manually made by the level designer. If I remember correctly the human grunts were smarter, like covering eachother and stuff. (I am not 100% sure though. Was my initial thought when playing HL2)
  - AeroNotix 5y ago
    HL2 enemies especially the Combine Soldiers would zerg at you in single file. The marines in HL1 were way better than that. The ninja people were better still..
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Ye good someone agrees I started to falter. From my limited HL1 modding experience, good waypoints were key for grunts. It probably made the AI way simpler to program with better results -- maybe an unsexy expert system -- which ended up better than the fancy general approuch. Wild guess
fullstop 5y ago
Enemy forces in The Division 2 were pretty clever. They cover each other, attempt to flank you, etc. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/designing-the-enemy-ai-of-the-division-2 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/designing-the-enem... There's definitely a balance between "real" and "fun".

0thgen 5y ago

could it also in part be to the fact that graphics can be parallelized on GPUs, and AI behavior is inherently serial? (and beyond perceptual tasks like vision, does modern AI benefit from GPUs that much?)

spywaregorilla 5y ago

That's not what you want at all. An AI can easily have perfect aim in a shooter game. Designers need to handicap them to be fun. The same goes for many dimensions of games. You could make AI more competent but its usually less fun. Even strategy games designed content usually come from you beating an opponent with a superior starting position. What you really want is more immersive AI. Not in terms of the intelligence, but in the ability to do actions that interact with the environment. But this usually requires one off animation and gameplay coding so its not something that can scale easily. Things like hiding under something form a large enemy and thinking "he can't get me" but then, oh shit, turns out he is capable of crawling.

tweakimp 5y ago
I think what he meant was a realistic AI, a perfect game logic for the role it needs to play, not a perfect solution for the task it does. Example: I want to have an AI for a monkey that behaves like a monkey would behave. And if that monkey sits in a drivers seat, I want the car to move like a monkey would drive, not like a perfect driver of cars.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  But the issue isn't the AI, it's the interface that the AI has to the game. Monkey drivers is a little absurd so let's stick to monkeys in the forest. A real monkey would probably climb the trees. But if the game doesn't have climbing mechanics, then its unlikely that the game devs are going to implement them just so that the monkeys can do this. Making a behavior tree to utilize available actions is pretty easy to do. It's the implementation of the animations, game logic, and environment to allow such things to happen. Little things like letting an actor turn its head to look at things will make the AI feel more alive than a more advanced algorithm for behavior. And you definitely won't see any particular gains by trying to solve it with ML brains.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> An AI can easily have perfect aim in a shooter game. I wouldn't mind that. I would be fine with an opponent like Scar in BSG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_(Battlestar_Galactica) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_(Battlestar_Galactica) Something that's actually smart and really, really not just there for you to kill, for once.

roland35 5y ago

I enjoyed the AI in Perfect Dark (N64), you could create a battle with a wide assortment of personalities (bot-alities?) like vengeance-bot (always out for revenge) or turtle-bot (try to get armor and hiding).

jstream67 5y ago

you should play the original FEAR if you haven't already. It has the best FPS bot AI that I can recall seeing. Part of it is that the AI often shouts out what they are doing so you get a better idea of their decision making process. It is a really great game.

xibbie 5y ago

Alien Isolation had some very in-depth AI governing the behaviour of the protagonist, and it really showed in gameplay. Getting the feeling you're being actively stalked by a sentient creature is legitimately terrifying, and it's the first time I've felt scared by the intelligence of a game's AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7d5lF6U0eQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7d5lF6U0eQ goes into some detail on the decision paths governing the AI.

TMWNN 5y ago
>Getting the feeling you're being actively stalked by a sentient creature is legitimately terrifying, and it's the first time I've felt scared by the intelligence of a game's AI. I've heard that the easier difficulty is scarier, because the alien appears less often so when it does it's more terrifying.

zkldi 5y ago

I actually don't think videogame AI has gotten much better since Halo 1. Maybe that game was just incredibly ahead of the curve, or that's as good as we can do.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

munificent 5y ago

Stupid games make players feel smart. Smart games make players feel stupid. Players like to feel smart.