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What was Radiant AI, anyway?

• Mistletoe 1y ago
  When will we get games that actually do do this? It’s one of the things I’m actually excited about with AI.
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  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    I'm not sure about the limits of the engine's complexity, but the game "shadows of doubt", a procedurally generated murder mystery game, has a giant sandbox with characters that have jobs, partners, visit restaurants, and more. I don't think the NPCs can do more than a handful of actual actions, but the way you can find who a character met by watching the security tapes of a particular restaurant from a particular time because on of the bat's neighbours says "I saw this person here last night" when you ask about your murder victim is extremely impressive. There is definitely a sense that you've seen everything after a while because of the limitations of procedural generation, of course, but a sandbox like that combined with scripted quests would make for some really fun gameplay outside of the main quest.
  • KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
    The Sims, Crusasder Kings, the new inzoi games all have this.
  • teamonkey 1y ago
    Honestly the big problem isn’t the tech. The AI techniques you use most often are decades-old and well-known, LLMs don’t really enter in to it except for generative dialogue. The problem is that except for in a handful of cases the idea is often more appealing than the reality.
    • PunchyHamster 1y ago
      Nah, the problem is that the enjoyment vs effort graph is a valley. Just adding some simple procedural behaviours isn't all that interesting and possibly creates bugs. You need to spend a lot of work and add a bunch of behaviours and interacting systems for line to start going back up and arrive in place where games like Rimworld, M&B: Bannerlord or Dwarf Fortress are. Like if your Radiant AI makes NPCs bandits go and attack NPC caravan, that's not all that interesting, and hell, player might not even notice and think it is scripted. Because aside from some quick loot there is no impact whatsoever on world, you can get rid the world of every banding within 10 mile radius and nothing will change aside from amount of loot in your inventory. But if you do similar thing in M&B:Bannerlord... there is actual (if simplified) economy there. You CAN starve a city if you just kill all merchant caravans going in, and raid the villages, and the city economy will go down, they will man less guards on siege and have less resources... and on other hand you can make sure local economy flourishes and that will cause prices to go down on stuff, which will cause city that now has access to cheaper weaponry to have more guards. If killing a bunch of bandits made city prosper a bit more (or vice versa, attacking traders and caravans made it poorer), if clearing local mine made some miners to move in to provide to city, if sabotaging army camp made a dent into political situation (imagine winning Skyrim rebel/empire conflict by sabotage like that), now we're starting into it being interesting rather than a gimmick.
      • teamonkey 1y ago
        Yes, there is a development cost, but it’s a feasible system. If the payoff is deemed worth it, it can be done at the expense of something else. It’s a design decision, not a limit of technology or even budget. The problem is that it’s hard to make a game a better experience this way, and for many games it would distract from or confuse the core experience, making it worse. It’s a well-explored problem too. Anecdotally, in my career I’ve worked on three games where this kind of system (at various levels of complexity) was proposed. Game designers and programmers love this stuff (I do). In the end these ideas were abandoned simply because they didn’t make the player’s experience better. If a tree falls in the woods, and no-one is around, does it make a sound? If the player encounters that tree lying on the ground, do they care that it’s fall was simulated after some event, or is the impact the same as if a level designer or procedural generation system placed it there? Will they even notice it? Can we make sure the simulated tree falls in a way that doesn’t break navigation systems, or cause a collision issue where the player can get stuck, because then they’ll definitely notice it in the worst possible way, etc. These are not impossible problems but it really takes a special type of game to make it not only worthwhile, but better for the player, and probably a special type of player too.
• ednite 1y ago
  Interesting read. Got me thinking, I’d love to see what happens when modern AI meets open world simulation. Not just prettier graphics, but actual reasoning NPCs. Imagine arguing with a World of Warcraft innkeeper about the price of ale. Priceless.
  • Dzugaru 1y ago
    Not possible, because can't be guardrailed with 100% accuracy. You'll ask it something outside of the Warcraft world (e.g. US politics), and it'll happily oblige. I imagine NPCs will generate really weird immersion breaking stuff even if you cannot freeform interact with them anyway. Not to mention the current token cost.
    • dleeftink 1y ago
      Write a couple of lore books, in-universe cyclopedia, some character sheets and exclusively train on them. Maybe some out-of-game lore for cross-over universes!
      • ileonichwiesz 1y ago
        Is that feasible? I was under the impression that fully training an LLM requires untold mountains of data, way more than a game dev company could reasonably create.
        • c0redump 1y ago
          You are correct. The fact that so many people are saying “lol just train it on text about the game bro” reveals how little people understand how these models work, how they are trained, etc.
        • com2kid 1y ago
          Microsoft's phi models are trained on a much smaller dataset. They generally aren't as amazing as the models that get talked about more, but they are more than enough to get the job done for npc lines in a game.
• weitendorf 1y ago
  After playing Starfield I don't really have any expectations for Bethesda to deliver on anything interesting anymore. The progression from Oblivion to Starfield has been one of becoming less like a small shop with character willing for its developers to take big risks with unique and intricate features, and more of trying to be a generic AAA studio that prefers predictable blandness. I don't think you can really hope that they'll magically return to making games the way they did 20 years ago. They seem to now be under the mistaken impression that radiant AI is to get more content out of the game by implementing infinite permutations of simple quests, and that customers will think X things permuted Y ways is X*Y content and not just X+Y content. But the purpose of radiant AI was, I think, to make the world feel alive and even unique. Which means I really shouldn't even see every x in X or every y in Y. If you want an interesting implementation of the same concepts as in Radiant AI I recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Every dwarf fortress world is essentially an entire history of thousands of radiant AI interactions up until you enter it, at which point your adventurer/fort becomes part of the world and continues the radiant interactions with its civilizations/wildlife/monsters/etc. I think DF is probably the ideal existing game to considering adding LLM-characters and conversation to as a drop-in augmentation. DF already has the simulation and generation of realistic characters and stories working, but unfortunately it's very formulaic to interact with it as an adventurer. In that case the game actually is quite "alive" already, just without a voice.
  • jasonjmcghee 1y ago
    Maybe through a mod. Hard to imagine Tarn would have any interest involving LLMs.
  • ksynwa 1y ago
    Yes. IMO Starfield's biggest failure is in the creative department. It is not interesting at all (for me) in terms of things like writing and voice acting etc. It is not a technical problem that can solved by innovative game mechanics like a roided up version of radiant AI (whatever that is). Games like RDR2 and Witcher 3 left such a mark on me becauss they had bold personalities. Starfield in comparison feels like corporate memphis despite a nice Nasapunk foundation.
• dedicate 1y ago
  I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical conversation with a blacksmith. I just want to see that blacksmith close up shop early because he's feuding with the town guard, or give me a discount because his daughter just won the local archery competition. I want a world that reacts to itself, not just to me. The goal shouldn't be to make NPCs that can pass the Turing test, but to make a world that feels like it has a pulse.
  • Legend2440 1y ago
    >I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical conversation with a blacksmith. You didn’t read the article, that’s not what Radiant AI did. This is from twenty years ago and has nothing to do with LLMs.
  • deadbabe 1y ago
    It doesn’t need to be a deep philosophical conversation. You could be striking up a “buy now pay later” business deal or asking him to produce a specific type of equipment according to your specifications, etc.
  • TillE 1y ago
    Agreed, that's the real dream of open world RPGs: dynamic worlds. Perhaps modern AI techniques can help in that a bit, but what you really need is an incredibly intricate simulation.
  • kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Do you really want that in a scrolls game though? I want the blacksmith to be first npc in the town, more or less always there, with 1 button on the dialog tree to get to the shop menu for me to unload an entire dungeon of loot onto this blacksmith. And he better have ore and leather strips.
    • nxobject 1y ago
      And I want to be able to game player statistics using a combination of spells and potions so I can pickpocket the blacksmith and then sell their stuff back at marked-up prices. The traditional RPG numbers-and-skills-and-formulas part of TES was a great joy to exploit.
• varelse 1y ago
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• supermatt 1y ago
  It’s entirely possible that Radiant AI in its entirety is actually in the original oblivion and the remaster. It’s just that they either forgot to enable the build flag, or part of their production release is to pick a random commit as gold master. As people had already parted with their money it’s been given the same priority as the game breaking bugs - which is to say it was left for the community to fix. Maybe they will put out a “hotfix” in another 15 years to enable it. I strongly believe that no bethesda employee has ever played a release version of their games.
  • paavohtl 1y ago
    Radiant AI is in Oblivion and every game they've made since then. There's nothing to enable. The issue is primarily with the game content; it's used all over the place, but in the final game it's not very impactful.
    • supermatt 1y ago
      By “in its entirety” I mean as it was promoted and originally demoed. The release version is vastly different to the pre-release demos (some are linked in the article)
      • paavohtl 1y ago
        Yes, I wrote the article. I wouldn't say the system in the release version is vastly different to the pre-release demo (there was only one to my knowledge, the E3 2005 one), as that just demonstrates a tightly scripted sequence of events, which one of the developers was open about even before Oblivion was released. Some things about the system definitely changed (such as disallowing NPCs to pickpocket from the player), but I don't think we have any evidence of whole systems or major behaviors that were actually implemented at some point and cut before release.
        • supermatt 1y ago
          Thanks, I enjoyed reading the article. That said, I’m pretty sure that they said the e3 demo wasn’t scripted (edit: the quote in your article confirms it, too). We were expecting, at the time, a game like in the demos. But as you stated, it’s probably more content related, in that they didn’t actually schedule much (or any) complex combinations of those packaged behaviours or npc2npc interactions as shown in the demos - leaving only simple instances of the packages you described. Maybe the dependency chain of goals has some concrete limit, for example. It’s mostly just “go here”, “find food”, “eat food”, “sleep” (which I suppose emulates life, but isn’t what we were expecting). Although I guess that the amount/complexity of wrangling the behaviours of 1000 (???) npcs to stop the game being unplayable due to goals being destroyed is why it’s just so passive in its release form.
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• flohofwoe 1y ago
  The closest thing we got to the idea of Radiant AI is probably Dwarf Fortress. But entirely goal-driven (and thus unpredictable) game AI systems like this are usually at odds with story-driven gameplay where the outcome needs to be deterministic (or at least "winnable") and the player is the hero which the story is built around (while games like Dwarf Fortress don't have a pre-defined story, and also no player character to take care of, and the whole fortress being wiped out because of comically unpredictable events is a large part of the "fun").
  • gmueckl 1y ago
    That was also my thought. How does the world behave 100 hours into the simulation? If half the town residents have managed to get themselves killed by guards and some of the shopkeepers are gone, it's a bad outcome. Complex sims have emergent behaviors that are hard to tune. The other thing is a bit more subtle. It's a big open world and all NPCs need to be active continuously for that sim to work. So you have a big N to squeeze into a tight per frame CPU budget. Also, things like path planning or object interaction only work if some information like object positions and pathfinding maps are kept in memory the whole time for the entire world. This sounds very challenging on a 2005 era PC.
    • ijk 1y ago
      The thing about Oblivion that the simulation tends to run up against is that hitpoints and death are an abstraction: a real human would die much more easily from the injuries that get inflicted, but also a real human would avoid a lot of problems in the first place (and have families that would take over their shop, and live in cities with more than twenty people hanging around). You run into trouble when one part of the simulation is taking things as symbolic while another part is taking it as literal. If you want it all to be literal you've got to be willing to go super deep into the emergent simulation.
    • morleytj 1y ago
      One of the classic emergent behaviors (which I loved) that came from Dwarf Fortress was the cats dying of alcohol poisoning. There was a patch note years and years ago about a bugfix that had to happen because all the cats were mysteriously dying in people's fortresses -- it was tracked down to the fact that cats would walk through the taverns, in which visitors would be drinking and occasionally spilling alcohol (There was a feature that had been added at one point for spilled liquids to form pools which could get on entities passing through, like getting mud on you by walking through a large puddle). The cats also had a piece of functionality where they could self clean by licking after they became dirty with something, and would ingest some amount of it due to using their tongue to clean themselves. The cats' fur would become damp with the alcohol as they stepped through the spills, and the cats self cleaning meant they would regularly get extremely drunk and die from the alcohol poisoning trying to clean themselves. Not intended at all, but two completely different systems colliding in an emergent behavior of interest. I also always loved the behavior of undead zones. In them, any dead creature could be revived by dark magic in the area. It leads to the question though, what counts as a dead creature? Well, it would be anything with a tag indicating that it came from something that died. This does in fact include small bones though, or hair from a butchered animal. Fortresses in these areas would have quite the casualty rate trying to butcher a pack mule as its hair would come to life and kill the butcher.
• netruk44 1y ago
  What an amazingly well researched and interesting post. I’m very grateful to the author for having done the legwork to research all of this. I loved how they were able to peel back the Todd Howard reality distortion field to really understand how Bethesda went from that famous E3 2005 demo to what we got in the end.
  • paavohtl 1y ago
    Thanks for your kind words! Researching and writing this consumed most of my free time for about two weeks, but I think it was worth it.
• ajkjk 1y ago
  I have remembered the phrase "Radiant AI" from the Oblivion Marketing when it came out, 2005ish I guess, when I was in high school. I'm glad it stuck with someone else as much as it did for me: the hype, the disappointment, but also the wondering what it could have been, because it sounded like a legitimately very-cool game feature except for the part where it didn't exist.
• hyperman1 1y ago
  When I played gothic, I was in the wilderness and in the process of being killed by some beast. Completely unexpected, a core NPC (Lester?) joined the fight and slew it. It turns out, he makes a walk between 2 camps every day, and happened to be around just at the right time. While already impressed by the AI, I was blown away by this l behaviour. He goes between 2 places that can't exist in RAM at the same time, and interacts with the world when it happens to pop into existence around him. Radiant AI should and could have been like this.
  • paavohtl 1y ago
    Radiant AI does work exactly like that. The game keeps the global cell-level pathfinding graph in memory at all times, and uses it to simulate NPC travel outside of the loaded area.
    • hyperman1 1y ago
      Technology wise they should be comparable, but the way its used feels different. The Gothic world felt much more alive than Oblivion, even if Gothic is from 2001 and Oblivion from 2006
  • Merad 1y ago
    Oblivion has multiple NPCs with complex schedules that involve travel between cities. And yes, you can run into them on the road. Best example is the countess of Leyawin, once a month she visits her mother in Chorrol (opposite side of the map) along with her personal guards and advisor.
• nxobject 1y ago
  > "Hail." > "I have heard that the Nords of Skyrim have been warring with the Redoran of Morrowind." > "It seems that these are turbulent times in the land of the Dunmer." > "Stop talking!" > "Take care"
• nxobject 1y ago
  After hearing the "everyone pickpockets everyone and goes to jail and/or dies" anecdote for the "original" Radiant AI, I'm beginning to suspect that the following are incompatible:' – there's always enough interesting characters to interact with to give quests etc.; - live simulated world with emergent behavior that involves characters disappearing; - no one enters or leaves town.
  • recursivecaveat 1y ago
    Honestly I think there is a fundamental incompatibility between: some sense of simulation or realism, and a high enough density of interesting events per character per hour to meet the player's entertainment expectations. A functioning society just can't supply enough arrests, trysts, bandit kidnappings, secret identities, feuds, marriages, etc etc, without rapidly tearing itself completely apart. There's a reason basically every TV show feels like it going off the rails after a few seasons: you can't lay rails in front of you as fast as episodes consume them. It only works at the beginning because you're borrowing against the stock of events that occurred in-universe before the show began. Dwarf Fortress kindof solves this by zooming out to increase the character count, as well as the standard fantasy trick of super-charging the economic productivity of everything. Letting 1 dwarf feed 15 by working part-time on a 25 square meter plot of mushrooms helps a lot.
  • o11c 1y ago
    The "always enough interesting characters" problem needs to be solved by something along the lines of "if an important NPC dies, the role is passed to an heir". But ... also the world needs to be less murder-y, and (related) actually have a closed economy. The article mentioned the problem of fitting audio on a single DVD (which would only be exacerbated by fallbacks, and no please don't consume my entire SSD) ... there certainly was a regression in video game creative dialogue when everything started to be voiced. And voice synthesis is an example of one of the rare problems that AI might actually be able to solve fairly reliably, though it's not clear if the jarring exceptions would be more of a problem outside the current utility problems. Though given that the individual input words should be known, probably just converting text to phonemes would suffice.
• devstar 1y ago
  As a Bethesda fan (spending 1000s of hours combined in Fallout and Skyrim), I enjoyed reading this post. Especially liked the use of creating your own NPC to test the various scenarios. I just now started playing the Oblivion remaster for the first time and I find that I am liking the NPC interactions / liveliness a lot more compared to their later titles. The one item that stood out to me was: "Todd’s mid-fight dagger acquisition Verdict: Impossible in the final game unless scripted to do so" I do not disagree with the verdict for the final build of the game but I recall observing something similar in Fallout 3. I had stashed a mini-nuke launcher and ammmo in the Megaton player home. Some sort of conflict transpired (do not remember what exactly, perhaps I provoked an NPC for fun), I witnessed one of the town-folk run into my player home (in its own cell) and come back out with my weapon. It is possible with 1000s of hours in Bethesda games I am just mishmashing memories together but I am pretty sure this is what prompted me to eventually download a player home mod (and eventually learn G.E.C.K. by "remastering" it).
  • paavohtl 1y ago
    Thanks for reading! It's an interesting anecdote, but from my understanding of the system that simply shouldn't be possible. Your house's interior cell isn't loaded into memory when you are outside in Megaton, so there's no way for the NPC to access your items. I think this fundamental limitation holds true for every version of the engine, from Morrowind to Starfield, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong with concrete evidence.
    • jwrallie 1y ago
      Sometimes NPCs can follow you if they are close to the door when you enter, so while it’s not so common it could happen.
• YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  >> The technology powering this next generation title is doing so much more than simply making everything look great, it’s also changing the rules of how virtual game worlds function. As mentioned before, the area of Tamriel that is the setting for Oblivion is populated with 1,000 NPCs. Unlike current games, these characters don’t simply disappear once the player leaves the area, they exist 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every character has its own virtual life and its own schedule to follow. You know who really did this? It's a game called Rain World [1]. In Rain World, the world keeps turning when you're gone. Literally: predators and prey go about their way, chasing and fighting and eating each other, after you die. When you come back they don't respawn. The game simulates their actions while you're away and you meet them again in medias res, doing whatever they were doing while you weren't there. And what was the reaction of the gaming public to that? A typical reaction on release was this article by Brendan Caldwell on Rock Paper Shotgun, whence I quote: Modern platformers that want to be difficult have learned the value of a quick and nearby spawn. Fell into some spikes? Never mind, says the game, and one second later you are at the last brick wall you leapt from. The slugcat doesn’t get this treatment, instead it is transported back to the nearest save point, the last hibernation chamber. The things you have done to the environment have been undone, the parts of the map you revealed have been recovered in shroud. You are ten screens back from where you were, only now the predators and prey will be in different places. (...) The oddest thing about it is that, like the controls, this difficulty feels entirely deliberate. It is like Rain World wants to have the strength of difficulty we find in Dark Souls. But that classic of dying and re-dying had the impetus of soul currency, a sense of gambling, a sense of pace, and the relief of clever shortcuts with near-perfect geography. Not to mention the HUGELY SIGNIFICANT gesture of always putting the enemies reliably in the same place, like a solid, immovable set of spiky hurdles. You always had the means to overcome and defeat them. You just needed to learn. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rain-world-review https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rain-world-review In other words: "What? I can't just memorise enemies' positions so I can defeat them by muscle memory alone??? I have to think?? Each time?? During a game????" :Throws controller: Yeah, so much about AI simulating enemies that have an independent existence. ________________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_World
• kibwen 1y ago
  Regarding debunking the skooma merchant murder anecdote: > The addicts live in a locked cabin, so it’s unlikely for the player to enter it unless they are specifically looking for it. This is overlooking a crucial, obscure, and unintentionally hilarious detail: not all the skooma addicts are in the cabin! Out in the world are two NPCs who make a monthly inter-city trip to the den to get their fix. However, due to a bug where these NPCs are assigned to the wrong faction, they can't actually get through the locked door of the den, so they'll stand outside the door drinking skooma forever, unable to progress to the step of the AI package that would eventually return them home to their usual schedules, unless the player unlocks the door for them. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Trenus_Duronius https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Trenus_Duronius
  • paavohtl 1y ago
    Interesting detail, thanks for letting me now. I had a look at the AI packages of all three visitors (Gelephor, Gellius Terentius, Trenus Duronius) and at least in the base game (without UOP) none of them carry skooma nor are scripted to find it. So even though the game implies they are skooma addicts via dialogue & environmental storytelling, from a purely technical POV they are not addicts. Getting stuck outside the shack checks out, though I don't think faction membership is the reason for that — they simply don't have the key to the door.
    • kibwen 1y ago
      > from a purely technical POV they are not addicts Videos show them performing the silly skooma-drinking animation while standing there locked outside the den, so they must have some sort of flag somewhere, even without skooma in their inventory. > though I don't think faction membership is the reason for that The wiki claims that patching them to add faction membership fixes the locked-out bug, FWIW. In any case, in conjunction with this bug we no longer need to assume that the addicts in the den are loaded and simulating at all times in order to make the murdered-skooma-dealer story plausible. It seems fair to assume that potions (including skooma) could once be consumed (per the demo video), and that a "consume skooma" package analogous to "eat" would have caused them to seek out skooma. It's true that shopkeepers have stored their shop inventories in hidden chests since at least Morrowind, but if we're charitable enough to assume that some "acquire from merchant" behavior was ever prototyped, then it's not hard to imagine some sort of hack was added to make it seem as though shop items were "in" a shopkeeper's inventory for the purpose of the AI's environmental search routine. Even if killing a shopkeeper did not literally make their shop inventory available from their corpse (for player balance reasons), that could still have caused the murder itself to happen.