Halo 2 Artificial Intelligence Explained

An anonymous reader writes "Stuffo has an interesting interview with Bungie's lead AI developer, Chris Butcher. Butcher explains in detail how the enemies in Halo 2 think and exactly why they do the things they do."

Comments

Re:AI

[mrdogi]

Humans 'tag' as well. We just do it much faster (with experience) and have years of experience to help with that tagging, both in speed and in richness of tagging. Although, I suppose we also get superfluous tagging ("What idiot painted that box yellow?") to distract us a bit.

Re:Unamazing AI

[AzraelKans]

Well.. you have to remember a few details before judging, first of all halo 2 is all about battles, so you would expect they expent more time on that than say "conversations" or other nuisances and on that level both as partners and as enemies the AI acts pretty convincingly. Second, halo2 is definetily a lot larger and complex than half life.(not HL2 though) so is a lot harder to coordinate the AI and place tag points effectively. And 3rd the AI in a console game expending so much cycles in a console in network and graphics code, can only be good enough to be believable, but cant expent so much cycles to be "ground breaking" so their target was believable and enjoyable and I think they got that right.

I havent even noticed before reading the article but the enemies DO talk to each other (in english) before teaming up on your poor butt. Thats an interesting detail to watch (although it ussually ends with you dead in the ground).

Oh I almost forgot, you have to play in the "heroic" dificulty level to see what the AI can really do. The easy and normal levels are quite dumbed down in comparison.