Infinite Games?

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.'"

Comments

Re:inspiring

[majestyk2000]

"Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith"

Couldn't tell if you were speaking of yourself, or of the character in the Lord of The Rings. If you are speaking of the latter, Boromir is the son of Denethor and the brother of Faramir. Denethor was the 'Last Ruling Steward of Gondor', and held no claim to the Kingship. Just thought I'd throw that in.

Re:inspiring

[Minna Kirai]

Well, obviously he's Boromir the 2nd, first son of Faramir, and named for his brave, departed uncle.

He must've taken the throne after Aragorn failed to sire an heir.

Good/New AI is not enough to let me do *

[drinkypoo]

...where * is used in the globbing sense. In order to do THAT we need fully deformable terrain. In other words, when I'm playing Tactical Ops, and someone throws a high explosive grenade down a stairwell at me, there should be possible real-world repercussions, like the building falling down around both of us.

Of course this requires insanely greater amounts of processing power than current games (except possibly Unreal Tournament, which is horribly CPU-bound these days on systems with the latest 3d accelerators.) You also need to be an architect to make maps because you have to have an idea of structural load distribution to do it in a realistic manner.

That could be a good thing, though; maybe more people would become architects, and the quality of level design can't help but improve because you're going to HAVE to make structures that could actually hold themselves up. (Floating structures will have to have some part of the structure that does the job of holding it up, possibly Laputa-style. (When the island falls apart, the blue stones depart upwards, toward the heavens.)

In order to do it you're going to have to generate new meshes based on damage (you can be pretty sloppy about this) and then figure out how they will be represented on screen -- you get THAT part for free if you use Multires techniques in place of traditional culling/occlusion methods. You also have to figure out how structurally sound they are. Software for determining stresses and failures in architecture is becoming more common on PCs, so that part of the puzzle is not THAT far off. Much more important is figuring out how to store and distribute the information relating to the new shapes of structures to all players.

Really, it's pretty dumb to have games with high explosives that don't have fully deformable terrain. Unfortunately, processing power is currently a limiting factor. Eventually, game engines will do this for you for free.