Game AI Conference Explored

Academia Blog Grand Text Auto has up a long set of notes from last week's first AI and Interactive Entertainment conference, which includes keynote talks from Doug Church, Will Wright, Chris Crawford and Damian Isla of Halo 2. From the Doug Church talk: "none of the AI detail gets attention in a 30 second ad or magazine blurb...also, if a character in battle only lives a minute, there's not much fidelity players can even perceive...industry has been promising good characters for a long time, not delivered... players are cynical, don't want to hear it anymore...hard to back out of the fakery"

Comments

Re:And now that think about it...

[Ford Prefect]

I wonder if the experiments in simulating the human brain will come in handy with making an AI.

AI for a computer game? Hardly.

One of the most effective, fun game AIs I've played against recently is that in Halo - it's probably no more advanced than that in some other games, but it has some great application of smoke-and-mirrors and does a good job of presenting obvious cause-and-effect behaviours to the player.

Kill a Covenant Elite, and all the lowly grunts nearby will panic and try to run and hide. But to actually shoot that Elite, it's probably taking cover behind a rock, waiting for you to attack - it doesn't just meander into combat, shooting blindly.

All sorts of things like this - simple 'IF foo THEN bar' behaviours which the player can learn, understand and anticipate can be great, so long as they're fun to play against. Some hyper-intelligent enemy that can figure out precisely where the player is and attack unseen might be programmatically more advanced, but isn't necessarily more fun to play against.

In-the-field tactics are probably best left to the game AI, but higher-level, map-specific scripted strategies can give the illusion of some overall plan behind the enemies' actions (plus they can be designed to be fun to fight against, rather than being whatever the AI might extrude - fun, crap or otherwise).

Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...