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> enemies that were smart and could snipe you I had Descent 1 on PS1, and I remember the box claiming the enemies adapted to your play style. Now that I'm olde

> enemies that were smart and could snipe you I had Descent 1 on PS1, and I remember the box claiming the enemies adapted to your play style. Now that I'm older and have studied machine learning and some other AI techniques, I've always wondered exactly what that meant. I'm sure my PS1 wasn't doing gradient descent (heh). What tricks were behind the claim that the enemies learned and adapted to the player?

gattilorenz 3y ago
Well, it's of course a marketing term, so I don't think it really needs to mean much. In videogames sometimes the AI skill is adaptive in very simple terms, e.g. reaction times or see/aiming range or chance of hit are increased or lowered to keep the game engaging.
jojobas 3y ago
AIMain.cpp is 7kloc. Searching for relevant words yields nothing, but it's not impossible to code something along the lines of "if the players flies around like crazy, do one thing, if he sits in the corner, do another".
- blincoln 3y ago
  I don't know how much Descent 3 shares with the original in terms of AI code, but Descent 3 seems to give NPCs a dynamic list of goals that's initialized based on their class ("stalker", "evader", etc.).[1] Each goal has a priority/weight, and criteria that will cause the goal to be enabled or not. Some of the goal enablers are straightforward, but others look more like state machine "emotion" states - fear, curiousity, etc.[2] Seems complex enough to meet the description on the box for the original Descent. [1] https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e712ae57ba6fad1cca987a3d22f7f/Descent3/AIGoal.cpp#L103 https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e71... [2] https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e712ae57ba6fad1cca987a3d22f7f/Descent3/AIGoal.cpp#L1457 https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e71...
Maken 3y ago
Given this was release at a time when in most games enemies simply roamed the levels and attacked the player when he crossed their line of sight, a simple automata based AI that actively pursued the player and tried to use cover when shot could be described as "adapting" to your play style.

gattilorenz 3y ago

Well, it's of course a marketing term, so I don't think it really needs to mean much. In videogames sometimes the AI skill is adaptive in very simple terms, e.g. reaction times or see/aiming range or chance of hit are increased or lowered to keep the game engaging.

jojobas 3y ago

AIMain.cpp is 7kloc. Searching for relevant words yields nothing, but it's not impossible to code something along the lines of "if the players flies around like crazy, do one thing, if he sits in the corner, do another".

blincoln 3y ago
I don't know how much Descent 3 shares with the original in terms of AI code, but Descent 3 seems to give NPCs a dynamic list of goals that's initialized based on their class ("stalker", "evader", etc.).[1] Each goal has a priority/weight, and criteria that will cause the goal to be enabled or not. Some of the goal enablers are straightforward, but others look more like state machine "emotion" states - fear, curiousity, etc.[2] Seems complex enough to meet the description on the box for the original Descent. [1] https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e712ae57ba6fad1cca987a3d22f7f/Descent3/AIGoal.cpp#L103 https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e71... [2] https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e712ae57ba6fad1cca987a3d22f7f/Descent3/AIGoal.cpp#L1457 https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e71...

Maken 3y ago

Given this was release at a time when in most games enemies simply roamed the levels and attacked the player when he crossed their line of sight, a simple automata based AI that actively pursued the player and tried to use cover when shot could be described as "adapting" to your play style.