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Infinite Games?

Posted by michael on from the rediscovering-MUDs dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "BBC is running a story on how US scientists are working on improving AI - with potential benefits for coming games. The system, called Liquid Narrative allows to avoid scripted storylines, and finally gives us, the gamers, full freedom to do whatever we want to do. R. Michael Young, the project coordinator, says: 'Game companies are realising that story telling has a lot of potential that has not been tapped yet.'"

3 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. For the geeks... by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... The Mimesis Project might be interesting as well. Apparently, they are using Unreal Tournament as a test-bed for the AI discussed in the article.

    But I'm still at a loss why they chose UT, of all games, as a "story-telling" AI test-bed. :-)

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    1. Re:For the geeks... by kevinvee · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm actually sitting in Dr Young's game design and development class right now. The reason he uses UT for most of his projects is that it has an excellent engine with a huge amount of 3rd party development support. The game comes with all the editors necessary, and you can export all the necessary code from the game itself in order to expand on the original engine. While the game epic created using this engine was a first person shooter, it could have just as well been a platformer or third person role playing game.

    2. Re:For the geeks... by PHoRD42 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, I was in Mimesis for a semester, and it's none of that, really. The only basis that I'm aware of was that UT can be modded heavily without spending thousands on licensing the engine. They've got a LISP server they connect to that manages all the game logic and the client is actually mostly a bunch of basic mod stuff, like tourists in the aquarium that wander around and form groups (which I coded) and various HUD changes and so on. All the real AI is developed on the remote controller, so it doesn't require direct modification of the UT engine.