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Nobody has invented effective programmatic mechanisms/patterns for general decision-making anywhere between if-else state machines and neural nets. The former b

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.
  - 0thgen 5y ago
    that's a good argument. part of the fun is learning the AI behaviors. and in modern games it honestly would take a while for that to get boring, the AIs certainly are getting more complex
  - phaedrus 5y ago
    Actually you could have more advanced boss AI while still keeping the player ability to learn its "tells" if the animation system had access to what the AI is thinking. Lights that turn from blue to angry red when the AI is contemplating firing, giving the attack a mandatory charge-up time, etc. The AI could be unaware of its tells or that it's telegraphing moves. Even more wild would be if the AI could be aware, so that maybe it tries to cover the status light or hide the weapon from view while it charges up. That in itself would be a tell.
Jasper_ 5y ago
The games industry has a lot of things in between state machines and neural nets. Since 2008, the craze has been goal-oriented AI planning (GOAP), which use a graph of states, and A* to pathfind towards a goal. And there's plenty of little tricks on top of this you can find in GDC talks. It's not without its tradeoffs though. https://www.aiandgames.com/2020/05/06/ai-101-goap-fear/ https://www.aiandgames.com/2020/05/06/ai-101-goap-fear/
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  > As detailed in Orkin’s 2006 publication at the Game Developers Conference whilst studying his PhD at MIT Media Lab, the GOAP system is driven by a Finite State Machine. Emphasis mine.
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    Did you look at the FSM? It's an FSM, but it's not an FSM like traditional game AI; it only has 3 states! And in modern implementations, it's only got two. It's practically just boolean flag.

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.
- 0thgen 5y ago
  that's a good argument. part of the fun is learning the AI behaviors. and in modern games it honestly would take a while for that to get boring, the AIs certainly are getting more complex
- phaedrus 5y ago
  Actually you could have more advanced boss AI while still keeping the player ability to learn its "tells" if the animation system had access to what the AI is thinking. Lights that turn from blue to angry red when the AI is contemplating firing, giving the attack a mandatory charge-up time, etc. The AI could be unaware of its tells or that it's telegraphing moves. Even more wild would be if the AI could be aware, so that maybe it tries to cover the status light or hide the weapon from view while it charges up. That in itself would be a tell.

Jasper_ 5y ago

The games industry has a lot of things in between state machines and neural nets. Since 2008, the craze has been goal-oriented AI planning (GOAP), which use a graph of states, and A* to pathfind towards a goal. And there's plenty of little tricks on top of this you can find in GDC talks. It's not without its tradeoffs though. https://www.aiandgames.com/2020/05/06/ai-101-goap-fear/ https://www.aiandgames.com/2020/05/06/ai-101-goap-fear/

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> As detailed in Orkin’s 2006 publication at the Game Developers Conference whilst studying his PhD at MIT Media Lab, the GOAP system is driven by a Finite State Machine. Emphasis mine.
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  Did you look at the FSM? It's an FSM, but it's not an FSM like traditional game AI; it only has 3 states! And in modern implementations, it's only got two. It's practically just boolean flag.