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Most Impressive Game AI?
togelius asks: "I have the feeling that when developers make the effort to put really sophisticated AI into a game, gamers frequently just don't notice (see e.g. Forza). Conversely, games that are lauded for their fantastic AI are sometimes based on very simple algorithms (e.g. Halo 1). For someone who wants to apply AI to games, it is very interesting to know what AI is really appreciated. What is the most impressive game AI you have come across? Have you ever encountered a situation where it really felt like the computer-controlled opponents were really thinking?"
Have you ever encountered a situation where it really felt like the computer-controlled opponents were really thinking?
No, but I've rarely encountered games where it feels like my human opponents are really thinking, either.
It doesn't cheat, and manages to beat the cr*p out of you on the higher level (where AI economies aren't penalized ... to make the game easier).
The Raven
...shows more brains that most ego shooter AI opponents. (AND it does not cheat.)
the micro$oft flight sim series for control of other planes on and off the ground.
There are a few traffic jams now and then but mainly realistic.
Diddy Kong Racing for N64, only because the AI there didn't cheat, unlike Mario Kart 64. In fact, the AI in MK still cheats on the DS to this day. Grumble.
A lot of AI that is used in games today can come off as cheap since the computer can think and compare much faster than a human player. Imagine fighting an opponent that can react 10X faster than you.
Another way to look at it is if you think that the AI is learning patterns and adjusting for tactics.
That's been played out in many genres, the most recent to come to mind is the Stargate SG1 episode where a character must face a situation that adapts to his efforts and becomes impossible to beat since the game can react faster than he can and has a perfect memory.
It's a ballance that game AI must match, playability and difficulty.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
supreme commander's ai was the first rts ai that i was not able to beat using the "survive the rush, build large army, overrun" recipe.
When I was contemplating learning video game programming, I was reading a guide that told you first to program a pong clone, and then a pac-man clone. Why pac-man? It teaches you AI. The ghost behavior is actually fairly complex. One ghost wanders randomly, another tries to get on the opposite side of the board from wherever pac-man is. The other two form a hunting pair: one tries to cut off your escape while the other goes for the kill.
I never thought that the ghosts would be so complex!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Civilization III. It's uncanny how it makes you think the game is outright cheating.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well, one of the greatest experiences (And still is), AI wise, is Stardocks XXXX-type space strategy game, Galactic Civilizations 2. I especially like, when on easier levels, you do something, and the AI race sends a message "It seems that you are making a massive buildup for war. However, with this difficulty level, I pretend not no notice it until you actually make your strike." or something to that effect.
The Best AIs I've found are in some games like Yu-gi-oh the card game I'm currently working on nightmare troubadour and most of the opponents I've played always make a "great" move. On the other hand there's a couple opponents who are dumb as bricks, yet these enemies are suppose to be dumb as bricks (they are first time players in the story) And it's amazing how poorly they play (the play "well" for stupid AI, but they make bonehead moves that a new player can easily capitialize on. The player feels like each player has a different style, not just a different deck, and that makes for a much better game. (this is coming from a 25 year old guy in the game business).
The reason it's great is that there's simple rules to the game that the AI can know. There's been one point in the game where the AI got confused mainly because I blocked her in with a couple traps, but overall the Ai's abilities in the game are outstanding.
The important think to know about AI in games is it's not "AI". It's scripts or code that simulates scripts. There's no neural nets or anything else because we can't get the power for a neural net in an active game. In chess we can but then chess no longer is fun unless we tone down the "intellegence".
Some other great AIs are Gears of War (On insane they do great flanking maneuvers and such) Ghost recon (they really seem to know how to take cover and make it a challenge for the player to take them out. however the friendly AI leaves.... alot to be desired), Oblivion (watching random people walk around is pretty impressive, it helped build up that game.) and others, but there's none that make me think I'm fighting a real person.
There is a push to create truer "AIs" in games, Gran turismo created a way to train Drivers, Forza 2 is improving on it's drivtar system, Virtua fighter 4 had a way to teach an AI fighter, which was cool and indepth. But these are all "Scripts" taken from player experiences, not exactly AI. There's other games working on "true AI" but even then it's still toned down because we don't have the tools to make the driver "think" yet. It's just rail following and teaching the computer how to follow rails or when to break away from them.
I wouldn't say the molyeniux's games had great AI but they have good AI that at least learns a bit. Yet they feel like it's all you telling the game what to do, and it trying to figure out what you want it to do (and it fails) where as the Sims has interesting AI, but never feels real (mainly because the game never feels real).
So overall if you want to see good AI, look at simple games, expecting full 3d world simulations to have great ai is still a long way off but it's slowly coming. However this push for "graphics graphics graphics" won't help AI in the long run, but hopefully in a couple generations we stop worrying about graphics and work on AI and physics which seem to be more beneficial to the player then higher polycounts.
I am constantly amazed at how bad the AI is in this game, after years and years of developement you would think that the Ai would have developed alittle more. While very advanced in speech capabilities, the AI relies on taunting you by claiming you are a noob, cheater, or a camping f**ktard, and will even call you GAY. In game play the AI is still weak and just does the same thing over and over again, and will constantly be baited into sticking its head around a corner, or runs into flashbang grenades on a very regular basis, failing to learn from its past and how it got owned over and over. Finally the AI deems you are a cheater and runs to load another AI called an Admin that will ban you because it cannot understand how you are so much better then it.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Personally, while enemy AI is something that's pretty neat to see in action, it's the friendly AI that gets my attention. Most games seem to put all their effort into the enemy, while you friends turn out to be schizophrenics with an IQ of about 40. I haven't played, but I have heard that something that people complained about in Gears of War was was the poor team AI.
I don't play many games any more, but Halo 2 was one that I thought pulled ahead of the pack a bit. Friends that can drive vehicles was pretty cool (albeit not always the safest drivers...) allowing you to man the gun in the back. They also seem better at not running right in front of you when you're in the middle of launching a rocket, and also do little things like take advantage of available cover (or in other cases jumping up on top of said cover and getting blown to bits). Halo 3 is supposed to have even better AI for both friendlies and enemies, and that's one of the things about it I'm looking forward to.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The Tic Tac Toe game in War Games. Nobody could beat Joshua, not even Joshua.
The best AI I have seen is probably in WC3. However, I feel that in many games, it isn't the AI that is good, but rather that the computer players sort of cheat by having knowledge of everything in their environment; for example, they know (from the beginning) where the bases of other players are, instead of having to search like a human player. This gives them a huge edge - think of it as a human player playing against another with a map-hack, very unfair.
Now, with a game as HUGE as Oblivion, it's quite easy to see the characters being dumb. Overall, though, it's refreshing to see characters getting up, going about business, talking to people, stealing, fighting, hunting, going to pub, buying, selling, going home, sleeping etc. I've also seen instances in Oblivion were a character has stolen something in front of my eyes, the guards have come along, attacked the person, then a riot has started between the people in the area. Example on Youtube.
Likewise, it seems like the only real advancements in AI in games seem to be happening in FPSs, such as they are, anyways. I typically play Turn based strategy games and RPGS, and honestly, we're not exactly talking about the smartest AI in the world here. In most of these games, the AI is only given an advantage by being allowed more knowledgable than you; also, in RTS games, especially, a common tactic for "buffing" the AI is reducing material costs and production times relative to the player's, depending on how well the player is doing: essentially, just a fancier version of the good-ol rubber-band AI so common in racing games.
I'll have respect for an AI in a game the second it actually manages to do something truly surprising. In RTSs and Turn based Strategy games, for example, it's often very easy to predict avenues of attack, unit composition, etc. Even if something wasn't necessarily expected, like having all of your treaties cancelled in one turn in Civ 4, for example, such a thing is still more of a surprise because of the timing than the event itself: you knew it could happen, it's just that the timing was a bit unexpected. No, I want an AI that will do something that will make me wonder whether or not the coding has been deliberately designed to screw with my head. When I find an AI in a game that can play me like a fiddle; bait me, hook me, and then reel me in, all the while as I struggle in vain, unable to resist the inexorable pull of its god-like strategy, then I'll be impressed.
For now though, beating the AI is still just meta-game thinking: figure out where the AI can't adapt, and then exploit. Give me a truly adaptable, creative AI, and we'll see. Of course, by the time we get to "creative," AI, I'll probably lose on purpose, just so as to not piss off Skynet (let the robotic overlord win.)
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
I would have to say that the AI for Wesnoth, an open-source Turn Based Strategy, is one of the better AIs I have encountered (for that genre of games).
Although it isn't that the AI is that well done, it is that the rule set is simple enough that an AI can follow it.
I've played Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic and Masters of Orion, the trinity of TBS games. Although they were often very good, the AI could only win in all of them due to "cheating" of a sort. The reason was that the various different factors to be considered were behind the planning ability of an AI. For example, in Heroes of Might and Magic II, there were seven different resources that a player could collect. Often, towards the end of the game, even while it was badly losing, the AI would be running around trying to grab resources, and would lose because of it. In Civilization II, because there was so many different units and improvements to be built, the AI would produce useless units, or spend all their time building improvements to cities that were about to be captured. The algorithm for keeping track of so many factors is impossible to make in an AI. AIs can't understand what is relevant and what is not.
So, in Wesnoth, there is only one resource to be considered, gold. Damage is also a straightforward mathematical calculation. So with the simpler rule set, the AI can play in a relevant way. Not that the rule set is simple in the sense of easy, it has a few factors, but those few factors can be combined in intricate ways.
So Wesnoth has one of the better AIs in my view, although of course it can still be tricked and worked around, but then any AI can be.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Command and Conquer.
I really appreciated the AI in UT2K4, mostly in multiplayer game; you could see the bots waiting for each other , crouched behind the door, before barging in; that felt very real. The fact that simple orders could be given (attack, defend, follow me, give me your wepon) was good; it's not specific to UT, but too often forgotten.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Ive noticed that AI is not designed to beat your next move but is designed to cheat you without the player noticing. Command and Conquer and Gears of War are two games that have two well hidden cheats. Command and Conquer is twelve years old almost, the enemy AI was programmed to always have full resources as long as one harvester made it back. Therefor what would take you five harvesters would only require them one. Most players would of never noticed this unless their strategy was to cut off enemy resources instead of an full out assault. Gears of War was praised for having AI that used the environment to their advantage which helped cover a little cheat they had. The AI had a weird tendency to know exactly where you were as long as your cross hair covered them or came close to them. For example if you were to pop your head out and just happen to have your cross hair on an enemy turret that was always firing at a covered friend, it would immediately start firing at you, this would also goes for the regular grunts/guards. This is very noticeable on "Insane", since that mode requires you to use cover 90% of the time and better tactics then rush in and shoot everything that moves. AI is not designed to outsmart/out think/or consider your next move, in my opinion most AI is designed to defeat you by using small cheats in the programming that give it an unfair advantage and hopefully designed so that you wont be able to notice it.
I was amazed when my pretztail not only installed a whiteboard in its den, but then proceeded to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. I think it's because I fed him a Doenut...
Comment of the year
GalCiv II has given me the worst beatings I've ever taken in a strategy game. Shogun: Total War managed to spring a tactical ambush on me once (although in fairness my grip on tactics was much worse back then). Both of those AIs gave me a challenging game experience as a player, which is what "good" AI should be judged by.
However, if we're talking about "impressive" AI, nothing I've seen in the gaming world can compete with Paradox's EUIII. Yeah, I know, each individual AI nation makes a lot of bonheaded moves. But the game is managing the armies, navies, economic, religious, colonial and foreign policies of up to 300 nations, every game day when a game year can go by in a minute or two, on a 1.9GHz processor. Considering the number of cycles and the amount of memory avaiable for each AI opponent, it's simply amazing to me. I really think that should be the basis of comparison, not so much the level of play the AI achieves, but the level of play it achieves with the resources available to each AI player. If nothing else, that standard makes it meaningful to compare old games against new ones.
...dunno what gamers they're talking to, but everyone I spoke to about Far Cry always mentioned either AI directly or the "mobs being really clever" (i.e. indirect positive AI appraisal). Pretty sure this has happened for others too.
ilovegeorgebush
I've read articles (maybe at Gamasutra?) citing surveys of playtesters on the perceived intelligence of AI opponents. I wish I could find the articles to cite them, but since I can't I'll just summarize them here:
Consistently, harder AIs were ranked as "smarter" no matter whether this was due to better algorithms or due to cheating. In fact, gamers tended to rank AIs highly that could do "neat tricks" -- say, tossing your grenades back at you, as in Return to Castle Wolfenstein -- which is something best acheived by writing special scripts for the purpose, not by advanced AI methods.
In general, it was concluded, you will be most successful in creating an AI which is perceived as "smart" if you do it the simple, dumb way: Count on the intelligence of your programmers, not of a machine.
[As someone interested in statistical learning theory (among other things), I found those results somewhat disappointing...]
Granted, most of us are computer nerds here, so we would marvel at really really sophisticated AI in a game. Does the average gamer (i said AVERAGE) share this sentiment? Certainly not. The average gamer is somebody who might sit down and play a video game for a couple of hours a week....its just a way of filling time to them. The VAST majority of gamers out there are not the pathetic second life player types who would benefit (well i guess it is debatable whether that is a 'benefit' or not) sophisticated AI.
My favorite game is, for instance, quake 3 arena. Yes this is mainly a multiplayer game, but when i need to space off and think about a problem at work for a while, i fire it up and play against the computer for a while. If i absolutely demanded smart players to play with, i'd play online.
in conclusion, the cost/benefit ratio involved with developing highly sophisticated AI is very very very high (if not > 1), meaning that it is foolish to pump money into it.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Here's a short article on the A.I. in the game F.E.A.R., "F.E.A.R.'s AI Demystified", (in more detail here). Having played through F.E.A.R., what impressed me so much was that a lot of what is called A.I. is actually audio and animation. You can make enemies seem way more intelligent than they really are by doing stuff like have detailed animations for stuff like hopping over barriers or diving through windows that's triggered when they are in certain spots. They would also have the enemies shout stuff, if you had your flashlight on they would scream "Flashlight" and dive for cover.
... only better.
... that is the key to good AI.
... even if it's a bunch of "if then" statements.
Observable results based on a stimulus understood by the player
1) Make sure the player can understand (or correctly infer) the stimulus
2) Make sure the actor responds in to the stimulus in a way that makes sense to the player
= WOW GREAT AI
While the goal is easy to describe I can't imagine this is easy to do . . .
Google Maps AI rules.
See point 23
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Some of Nintendo's Mario games have pretty good AI, like Mario Cart and Mario Party.
I always enjoy the C&C series "brutal" AI, even though they aren't particularly human-like, and sometimes have economy cheating.
The government can't save you.
Even though Stalker is lacking in a lot of areas
:(
It's AI is pretty evil.
Excellent pathing on it, First AI I can think that retreated into a house, and moved onto the roof to shoot at me
The sad part is, while the pathing on it is really nice, kind-of-almost human.....
It's cheating, Damn infinite ammo
If they just went the extra mile and made an AI that manages it's ammo and bum rushes you\Runs like a pansy when they're out of ammo, I'd be advocating it for AI of the decade
If you want a really challenging AI, and one of the best I've seen around, I highly recommend Galactic Civilizations 2. It's a 4X game similar to Civilization but takes place in space. The developers frequently post articles about the AI and how they are continuing to improve it. Furthermore, they read user's strategies and then improve the AI. The greatest part is that on the Tough setting (highest difficulty before they start giving the AI bonuses), the AI provides a challenging game. This is unlike most AIs where a "challenging" AI essentially means that it has a 200% economy bonus. Interestingly, the AI adapts to your game play and they have talked about using the second core in dual core processors to analyze previous games and use different tactics to counter known strategies.
To anticipate an AI move isn't always a bad thing, because great minds think alike, eh?
analog < infinite binary (Heisenberg is with me on this one)
Galactic Civilization I and II (see: http://www.galciv2.com/) is one of the few games I have ever played where it seemed like the computer was thinking. If you have never played GalCiv, and you like strategy, I highly recommend picking them up. I consider them to be superior even to the Civilization series. Brad Wardell prides himself on the AI, and it definitely shows. The computer is very difficult to beat and does not cheat. It actually responds in a logical manner, which makes GalCiv go from just being a number-crunching exercise to an actual strategy game. For example, when making some "aggressive" moves towards an enemy (moving some attack ships to an "ally" to wipe them out) I've actually had the game pop up a message from my ally (before ever entering his space) saying something to the effect of "I used to play video games when I was a kid, and when I did I used to build my forces up and send them to sneak attack an opponent. Well I am no video game." Other things like the fact that if another civilization is dependent on you for a large amount of trade income, they won't just randomly attack you because it would hurt them too.
Walked up on a group of 2 bandits, pumped a few rounds in one guys face and he drops like a rock. The other guy does absolutely nothing. Now maybe he won't miss the guy I killed but wouldn't you at least turn to get a look at the person that just sprayed brain matter all over you?
Blood money. the AI is insane, even at the lower levels.
portfolio
errr, system wasn't called Joshua.
The computer is called WOPR.
Professor Stephen W. Falken's son was Joshua and combined with the age the child died at was the system password.
... whatever version is actual right now. Heck, even my HTC Wizard at 200 Mhz constantly kept beating me at any higher difficulty setting, and it was definitely not cheating, if you take my meaning.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox has to have one of the best AIs among games of its kind. It never cheats, it can surprise you, and beating enemies actually feels like an accomplishment (and if you loose, it's not because the enemies are impossibly difficult, but because you're not skilled enough, or you're not going about beating them the right way). I don't think I've ever come across anything like it.
I can tell you the most unimpressive AI: World of Warcraft. It's so stupid another computer (wowglider) can play it with minimal configuration from a human.
have used some pretty impressive AI...
:L
goombas on super mario brothers for NES also had a solid movement pattern that deserves mention!
It always seemed to know exactly what blocks you DON'T need. I always thought Tetris was a rather malignant professor sort.
I have never seen game AI that worked intelligently. My gaming cycle goes like this: learn the controls, remap the controls to optimize, get specific reaction time down, figure out the basic AI repitoire, learn the "maps", master reaction times, learn to trick the AI or "squeeze between the cracks" of the AI.
People learn to do tricks the computer doesn't do. This is the draw of online FPS games like Quake, Counterstrike, etc.
If developers wanted to make good AI they would beta test the Player vs player version before the full game and model the tactics of the better players with their AI.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
So-called "Game AI" is not even AI. It is just s few fancy tricks to make the game program look, but not actually be, a little bit smarter.
Mind.html recently became a True AI that reveals the deep thought process in a tutorial display mode. You can interact with the AI Mind and watch it thinking, as spikes of excitation spread by associative tag from concept to concept in the knowledge base of the genuine artificial intelligence.
Mind.Forth AI for robots is written in Win32Forth for installation in autonomous mobile robots and has spawned at least one independent offshoot on the Web as the true AI evolves and speciates into multiple branches of live-or-die AI in the Darwinian jungle of survival of the fittest.
Franks AI Mind is the "son-of-Mind.Forth" AI with advanced features such as the ability to send e-mail and to read Web pages.
Unreal Tournament.
It had the first bots that you could play against for hours and not even notice you were offline. I havn't encountered a more convincingly human AI in the dozen FPS games I've played since, including UT 2k3(which probably means that the UT maps were just easier to code for).
It's the only game where you can feel yourself increasing in skill over the course of a few days of playtime, and ratchet up the difficulty a bit and get the same kill ratio, without feeling suddenly overwhelmed by perfectly aimed headshots.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
If you played this when it first came out you'll probably agree with me that Shodan was an implacable and reactive enemy that would not only threaten you but follow through. And this was all obviously scripted (the best way to create a realistic intelligence, look at how intelligent the NPCs in the Fallout series were compared to your average level of interaction in a RPG). I don't think that an average game developer has the resources to create an amazing AI for just one game leaving simple algorithms + scripting for specialized situations as your best bet to get a realistic feel to the in game situation.
00010111 always try everything twice
People don't play games if get consistently beaten. They want to win.
If your AI is too good it won't make for a very fun game. It just has to be
good enough not to lose easily. The best thing would be a game that tailors
it's difficulty so it's challenging for the player but not too hard. It should
adapt as the player gets more skillful. Just my 2 cents.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
I truly think this AI is genious.
:'(. So I ran for it.
... Ok... Let's just sign of this mission in the small village I talked about before.
;-).
I was doing some running around and when you just come out of the first village, you can go right. At that point I saw some military looking guys with guns like MP5 or so (turned out to be a more advanced version of an AK, but whatever). So I think like "cool, I want such gun". First I tried walking over there, and asking them nicely.
Didn't work out so fine and I found myself reloading the last save.
Then I would go in there Quake-style. Pretty cool, got 1 down, and 2 shooting at me while a bunch of other guys where approaching. At that point I died (again).
Then I tried with a little more tactical style, use bushes to hide my presence, hiding behind trees and stuff, but when you walk through bushes, the leaves whistle in the wind. Seems one of the military guys found out and came checking it out.
Stupid as I was, I started blasting with my pistol (result: dead again).
Then I played a little better and got 3 of them killed. And I got 2 nice guns! (couldn't find the 3th gun though).
So I was moving the bodies to be hidden by some bushes when the next patrol came along. Too bad for me because I still had 1 body to hide.... Couldn't
Then I thought like
When returning to the surface, I found out the freakin' village was under siege by the military! They freakin' came to avenge the death of their fallen comrades.
If you don't agree with me that THAT is some nice AI coding, I really don't know what you call a good AI
With Blake's http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threa did=159157A Better AI which Firaxis actually included in the latest patch, it's gotten pretty impressive.
CRobots! Oh man I had this one that...
One of the things I don't like about FPS's is trigger events. It's not really AI, per se, but it makes the computer absolutely predictable, which is what a good AI should not be. For example, if you played a mission once, died when you got to a certain point because some triggered enemies surprised you, and then went back through the mission again, you would now know exactly where these guys are going to be and how to kill them. It's one of the greatest failings of FPS's. Even the Halo series had triggered enemies, and it's lauded as one of the greatest FPS's of all time. This wouldn't be so bad if the enemies would "spawn" with a sufficient time gap for the event to go unnoticed, but sometimes you'll be in a room with no enemies and than the next second there's 4 elites firing at you. I've noticed this in almost every FPS I've ever played.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Nef... Nefarious... man, what a b*tch.... bent me over and rode me hard... (Nef is an AI in the very crack-like addictive Risk-clone game Lux... ;-) )
Nothing could have prepared me for unlocking darksims, chasing one towards a ladder, and then finding him rotate his upper body completely around to fire back at me as he continued to ascend.
Kohan has scripted AIs and a AI scripting language. Some of them are pretty sophisitcated and specialized on a certain faction or even to a certain type of map. If I pick the best in a Game I allways lose.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Anybody remember Falcon 3? While all the other sims pretty much had scripted missions (many still do), Falcon tried to run the whole war in the background. And when you ran into other planes, they acted pretty convincingly. They were hard to beat as well, I remember the Mirage F1s especially as being pretty tough in a dogfight. Pilots of different planes acted differently according to their planes strength/weaknesses. They used 6 months to patch the game sufficiently that it didn't crash all the time, kind of understandable with the complexity.
As an example of how complicated AI (which you all know stands for Algorithmic Interaction of NPC's ;-) can be, I once read a really lengthy article about the AI efforts put into NPC/bot aiming in one of the Quake engines. Basically, you can trivially create a bot that has flawless aim. This will create about the worst gaming experience ever, you see it you die. Take that back, you didn't even see it yet..and die. So, you go about creating an aiming algorithm that needs to mimic human style aiming taking into account reaction times, distance, NPC viewing direction, lead time when characters are moving, reloading times, weapon switching choices, etc. Really, you can spend weeks just tweaking this and still feel like you are playing a bot.
game AIs aren't supposed to be smart. they're supposed to be entertaining. this usually means they must let the user win at some point... which usually means they can't be as smart as they could be.
also, so much CPU cycle goes into the amazing graphics, sound, and the physics engine in today's games that there is little CPU cycle left over for AIs. eye candy sells more than the good AI, for better or worse.
An AI researcher once told me that the AI research industry can't get its R&D funding from the game industry because game AIs have inherently different goals than the research AIs. AI research is usually about using all available CPU power to create the smartest AI possible - game AI is about using as little CPU as possible to create AI that eventually defeats itself.
...was one I wrote myself. Years ago, back in the DOS days, I wrote this fun little tactical space battle simulator. (I'm ashamed to admit I wrote it all in QuickBasic. Even used this crappy 3D wireframe graphics library that constantly made the computer crash.) Each player was given a certain number of points, and you could spend those points on spaceships, so each battle would start out fairly evenly. It was originally written to be a hotseat game so that I could play against my brother. But as it turned out, I knew enough about the game mechanics and the capabilities of each ship (is anyone surprised by this at all?) that everyone I played against was barely a challenge at all. So I started writing an AI to play against. It didn't take long to think up a bunch of tactics to give the AI that would make for a solid challenge. The hardest to beat though, was when the AI would place it's longest range ships on the front line, match your heading and speed, and proceed to target your engines first. As soon as engines were disabled, it'd target the next ship, never firing more more often than it needed to in order to disable a ship. And it would almost make sure to stay as far out as possible from all ships chasing it. If you failed to select ships with long range, you were almost guaranteed to lose (cloaking ships worked OK, since they'd let you get within range, but the ships in your fleet that couldn't cloak would get decimated), and if you did pick long range ships, you still usually lost simply because the AI could do 3D spatial math a heck of a lot better than you could. After a certain point, I realized that I'd have to change the game mechanics significantly if I wanted any hope of beating the AI, and that felt too much like cheating.
That said, Galactic Civilizations 2's AI is almost as frustrating to play against, but on occasion, I can beat it. I don't think I beat the space sim's AI even once after I finished it.
The game was not perfect, its crap save system for one thing BUT playing as the alien had some nice moves.
For once the "enemy" was more then just cannon fodder with a deathwish. You were a nasty scary alien and the humans knew it. So a fair number of them would NOT react all that well to signs of your presence.
Once I was hanging upside down from the ceiling slowly eleminating the lights. Below me a civilian must have spotted something for he threw up a molotov cocktail (or similar) at the shadows. Offcourse gravity did its job and it exploded when it fell down again and engulfed a soldier and another civie.
Another event had me again on the ceiling staring around corner down a hallway that was sloping down. At the end a soldier with a rocket launcher must have spotted me for he fired a round. Pity that a bend in the tunnel was in the way and the rocket exploded just a few meters away from him. AvP had volumetirc flames but by the time it reached me I had already ducked back into hiding.
Other events saw soldiers machine gunning straight to civilians as they tracked me and scared people hiding in toilets and throwing grenades in confined spaces.
In itself stupid behaviour every last one of them BUT made realistic because of the fact that the AI acted as if it was scared.
If it had been a regular soldier fps the AI would have blown chuncks, but because you were a scary nasty meany alien chewing the head of humans, the AI worked.
The combination of soldiers tracking you down combined with the capacity to introduce a state of mindless terror really worked. AI makes a dumbhead move? Must be because you scared it senseless.
Pity the sequel lost all of the originals capacity.
A really great AI must make you believe you are part of a real world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's my manager's; Basically his algorithm is to listen to what I have to say, deny my ideas or find a situation where an exception would be generated and then depending on the number and level of participants, introduce my idea as his. I tell you, that shows great intelligence to his overlords although it's artificially generated but the actual participants start to get it after a few times.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Gran Turismo: They drive like robots, making the same mistakes on turns, and don't even dodge you if you are sitting in the middle of the road.
GTA: Not exactly "worst" but they follow such a linear fashion(cops, bad guys, etc) it is easily exploitable. Cars are programmed to chase you at maximum speeds, and will overshoot if you drive slower. I've seen cop cars drive off of docks into the water. Easy to do PIT manuvers on.
(SA) Supposedly in the gang wars they will run away to make you think they are retreating, but come back later. Some will even crouch to shoot you.
There are a few parts in the game where different enemy factions are fighting each other and you can walk a few steps into the room without being noticed (at least for about 1/2 the battle anyway.) I noticed that if I trained my crosshair on someone during that time, they'd always turn around and shoot at me. The first Halo might do this too, but it's not so readily noticeable.
Duke Nukem Forever
There was this game called Outcast, that worked the persoanlity thing well too. You had a reputation with the locals, and that really effected the game.
It probably wasn't that terribly complex a thing compared to much of today's AI, but the direct, slowly developing effects on the game made it very immersive. By halfway through the game I cared about my relationship withthe locals as much as the game objectives.
We are all just people.
Ask Kasparov...
Good AI is difficult to notice, because it seems "natural." Better AI is even more difficult to notice. Because AI's aim is to act like a person, and human decisions are extremely obvious for us. So, as you improve AI, it becomes a force that seems "natural." Collision detection is like this - it's never noticed until it screws up, and it seems natural even though it's a pretty tricky problem.
Developers can spend their lives improving a feature that has minimal perceived impact on gameplay experience. Typically, if something works well, it goes unnoticed or gets misrepresented, misunderstood. For example, the character movement gameplay in Prince of Persia and TMNT: The Video Game is phenomenal! (except for fighting) But it works so well that many players deem it "on rails" or something like that, "it's too easy to do [this], so I must not have enough control, and obviously a hack was used."
I disagree, I just think that people need to notice a feature to praise it, and honestly the best programming goes unnoticed, when it does its job. Especially, especially with AI, because the solution to a pathfinding problem is extremely obvious to us, or "you'll get killed if you go here."
I think that AI will soon progress the way that physics did. For a long time in our physics code, we could only use rectangles, then eventually the rectangles could move perfectly horizontally, then floors could slope 30 degrees, until the current iteration in which we can do pretty much anything we want, because crazy mathematicians spent years perfecting physics collision/resolution algorithms.
Our children will never notice that physics was ever a tough problem, because the (software) technology works so well.
Anyways, the game with the best AI has probably gone unnoticed, because that's the nature of the game.
http://www.wesnoth.org/
... Memorable encounters with enemies and NPC's are. The truth is what made Halo so great was how you could interact with the enemies in the game and how the enemy was made to seem "alive", like how they spoke in their own language and how the little guys spoke english like "Grenade!!" when you tossed a grenade at them, and the crazy things they'd do you when you stuck a grenade on them. Next A.I. is a huge topic, things as simple and mind numbingly dumb (to the gamer) as pathfinding are made needlessly complex, I'm especially annoyed by supreme commanders decision not to make friendly units pass through other friendlies, the pathfinding is at times so cumbersome a lot of time is wasted, it holds back the player. A.I. should never frustate the player experience (unless its in terms of difficulty/challenge settings). Next, A.I. Cannot be divorced from other elements of the game: Like animations, how models interact with one another, etc. After all A.I. is the glue
One of the reasons supreme commander hasn't lived up to the hype is you can't move the camera to enjoy the battle like is seen in the video's. Take the best games... like Halo and God of War, what do they have in common?
1) Interactivity with the enemies (i.e. grabbing, throwing, stabbing, etc, YOU CHOOSE how an enemy dies, i.e. throw, vs slice in half, etc)
2) Great animation and cinematography camera work.
So it's not about making A.I. Complicated, many real intelligent thins are "stupid" (obey rules) that give rise to complex behavior.
NETHACK!!!!!!
Naruto Gekkitou Ninja Taisen 4 has one of the most annoying AI every developed. The "easy mode" AI are almost impossible to lose against. They might get an ocassional hit here or there, but rarely anything else. They rarely use supers and always kawarimi (replacement technique) when hit by more than 2 hits (from any source, including ranged attacks, which in the real game are rarely worth using 75% of your chakra to dodge). Then there is the second type of AI. They just turtle, replacement every hit, dodge every super attack, and to make things worse: COUNTER EVERY THROW AUTOMATTICALLY. Bugh...fuggin' impossible to train for tournaments without a friend.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I would have to say that the WW2 sim Brothers in Arms had some of the best AI Ive come across. Being a fast paced, life or death war game, the movements of the AI are supposed to be quite twitchy, but even so, almost convinced me that these people beside me that were shooting at those people over there, were actually people. Add in realistic movements like looking around corners, popping heads over walls, running crouched while holding ones helmet, all adds to a very believable experiance. What I would suggest however, is to start modelling the response time of actualy humans. I think its around 0.2 seconds? And only then start thinking about how to react to a situation.
Heh! All you Slashdotters know zilch about truly terrible AIs...
I regularly play Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch (and I am one of the programmers of the patch as well, but that is a different story).
The AI is so terrible that you would not believe it.
The game begins, and an AI company is created. It then acquires a huge loan, and sits for 5 years losing money. It then goes into "braindead constuction mode", where it feverently tries by trial and error to find the least profitable transportation system it can, by avoiding the non-existant obstacles.
From knowing some of the internals, I know that terraforming is basically done by the rand() function, and that they do it for free.
When zoomed out, their handiwork looks like my signiture, untidy, with no straight lines and lots of loops.
It's so broken, that I now play with it off, as they make the place look untidy and might accidentally demolish a small town or something equally foolhardy.
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
The squad tactics used by the human commandos in Half-Life 1 are very slick. Hide behind a corner, and one guy will lob a grenade to flush you out, while another takes up position to shoot you when you move. I fell for that on more than one occasion.
... those cheating AI's commonly found in EA games. Namely NFS: Most Wanted. The computer somehow managed to keep up with my car which was doing in excess of 400km/h. Also the police somehow managed to find me when after a quick trip outside the level because I was travelling to fast, I spawned over the other side of the map.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it will be #1 when released!
sorry, couldn't resist.
Damned computer used the first round to study you. You could win, say, by poking with the light sword hit, the computer would counter with the heavy sword, and since that hit had a longer recovery you could land some medium blows in there. Next round, the computer will counter-poke with the light sword instead of going with the heavy. You counterhit and now you are on the receving end of the simple strategy of round 1. Best way of beating the computer was going for completely outrageous stuff in the first and then use the conservative tactics in the second. If outrageous stuff didn't work out, then you were SOL.
... oh yeah Uhh, that wasn't what you meant, was it?
That site requires you to pay. sorry about that.
http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=367
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
There is 1 video game that made the difference for me in AI:
--FACADE--
Playing this free game gave me a hint on the future of games
Musta been some rats.
(Guards with AI smart enough to rationalize away the need to do any work are advanced indeed.)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
In years of gaming I've never come across a particularly impressive AI. I've found that the computer "cheats" sometimes to seem more advanced (such as in Age of Empires, at higher levels of difficulty, instead of getting smarter, the computer opponent just starts with more resources than you). In most cases, game AI succeeds solely because it's connected to the game world more than is possible for the player, and it does what computers do best, which is to flawlessly repeat instructions, making it a far superior resource optimizer than a person is. For example, in some FPS games computer opponents effectively move faster because it knows with pixel precision the clip of every corner of every wall, ledge, and obstacle, so it can turn corners faster than you can. Along the same lines, the computer can make a shot around a corner with 100% accuracy where a player might fail and hit the corner about 10% of the time. What I find most disappointing is that games never even introduce the lowest level of AI, statistic decision making. For example, in a game like DragonRealms or Morrowind (or any other game in which stealing or crime is possible), guards are 100% reactive. They will never pro-actively go somewhere that crime is statistically likely to happen, they follow a set path until crime is reported, then they react. Even at times where I've seen guards given a pro-active algorithm, it's too predictable, to that point that two people can always coordinate and fool it. The last thing I want to mention about AI is that I can't stand instantaneous information flow. If you take an action anywhere in a game, the information about your action is available through the entire game world (unless artificially limited). Computer Players don't have to communicate with each other and pass information through normal channels (speech, writing, etc.) like players do. Take Morrowind for example, if you kill someone, everyone in the world knows it. If your reputation goes up or down, people everywhere treat you differently even if, the moment you take the action, you instantly teleport to a location that no one else could possibly have spread the word in, they've already heard about you. It just makes the game seem very mechanical if the game itself doesn't communicate in the same way people do.
First of all, it's worth pointing out that simple and good do not exclude each other. I've seen some pretty simple AIs with simple goals, and they do well. In some games, like Vice City, the AI is usually pretty basic, but then does something stupid, like jumping off a bridge or running in front of my car.
I am impressed when an AI beats me, even after I'm experienced. Not so much if reflexes are a big part of the game. I am not impressed by simple AIs that just run towards me, and fires a gun when in range.
As for whether or not gamers appreciate good AIs, they do. Very much so. I appreciate a good AI more than graphics. However, overly-complex, buggy AIs are not as good as reasonable, simple AIs. If you can make a good AI, please spend the time to do it. It's worth it.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
... good management or good typography.
... and you're not noticing the AI, you're just playing the game.
You don't notice them.
You only notice their existence when they're bad.
In a game, if you find yourself playing the game rather than working out how to defeat the AI algorithms then that's good AI
The guys who made the AI for that dinky little C64 game did a fantastic job.
Better yet, they included a small book on how they developed the AI. Went to cons and watched expert players. Developed test routines. Tuned those routines. And at the end of the book they include the actual algorithms in the game, too. I'd consider it a must-read for anyone doing game design.
And even knowing the algorithms, it still doesn't help. That game *still* kicks my ass.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I've always found it difficult to beat some of the AI from this project:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~poker
A game's systems work together to create an experience--in order for one to shine the others must be well designed, crafted, and integrated. Sometimes fixing a camera, tuning NPC stats, or adding some scripted chatter will do a lot more for the perceived intelligence of the opponent than a more sophisticated AI algorithm.
I think it's easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal (making a fun game) when coding AI, because, let's face it, making brilliant AI is a sexier challenge than paying attention to all the little details the make a level play well. Ironically, one of the problems in game AI these days is how to make the AI a little dumber (but not a lot dumber). It's easy to make a chess AI that will beat most people, but getting one's ass handed to one 30 times in a row is tiring to say the least. On the other hand, an AI that can be beaten handily isn't much fun either.
for me,
is xwing vs tie figther
i doubt anyone can belittle the ace setting on that game
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Solitaire?
FreeCell?
Spider Solitaire?
Minesweeper?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(computer_gam e)
The AI in Descent was quite good. The bots would use flanking, ambush and pursuit tactics.
Over time any game's AI will reveal flaws and open itself for exploitation. I've never played a game with AI that I would be bold enough to call "immersive", and I've played a shitload of games over the last 10 years.
FEAR's AI is magnificent from what I've seen. I've only played the first few missions (because to be completely honest the game is very creepy.) but the AI on those first few missions played very smart. Using cover wisely, faking out flanks and using the numbers to their advantage.
It ain't AI until I can ask it "Do you like this poem" and it gives a meaningful answer.
The game stuff seems more like a lot of parameters put in anticipated by a human author.
Question for any games devs out there, which kind of AI is generally more difficult to write, turn based or real time?
Now ignoring stuff like FPS where you can get away with fairly basic AI if you want, you have turn based (ie Civ, chess, Battle for Wesnoth etc) and real time (Starcraft, C&C, boswars, etc). Obviously there must be some very different strategies and approaches, for turn based you get to spend a lot more cycles figuring what to do, then again the player has a lot more expectation of a good strategy from you. For real time you don't have much time to make decisions and need to be very event based, but on the other hand you generally have fewer variables to worry about (after all humans need to play it as well) and you have a significant click speed advantage over the human player.
So any game designers out there who've worked with both and have an opinion on the respective difficulties?
I stole this Sig
metal gear solid series has the best ai i've ever seen, while the worst is splinter cell for sure, just shoot at the light and they'll never see you even if you are close to the enemy and you also have 3 green lights on your head...
The AI could see not only see in a view fustrum, but also by how much light you were lit by. The AI could hear depending on what surface you walked on, you could affect the light by putting out torches, affect the sound my mossing the floor. The AI notice bodies and things out of place, such as a climbing rope. The AI also had different alert states. I think that they are pretty good for a game made almost a decade ago.
6 3
9 &page=11
There are over 400 Thief series fan missions. Last night, I played "Ominous Bequest"
http://southquarter.com/?p=131
One level change for 6 hours of gameplay! Yes, Thief 1 and 2 graphics are quite dated, and low-poly, but if you can forgive that, the gameplay and atmosphere compensates for it.
Lately, there's been a reinsurance in Thief 1 and 2 add-on missions. There's a updated version of 680mb Thief2X add on. Missions like "Ashen Age," and a "Night in Rocksburg" have breathed a little life into T2 visually.
http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=552
http://southquarter.com/?p=131
Someone is working to refresh the Thief Series Engine, but the source code would help. I wish that Eidos would release the source code--for an eight year old game.
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10228
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
One of the most agrivating AI's i have ever played against was the original Phantom Crash Area Rankers.
They were dead stupid as far as guessing where you were at but in aiming...well I think they were just rescriped aimbot's from CS.
I wish that game had gone deeper than it did. That's one game that could really benifit from human-like AI.
But fl0w has decent AI.
Money is the root of all evil?
I'm having trouble on even the easier difficulties.
This discussion would be remiss without mention of the ai in gnugo, and the ai found in go computer software in general. I have a very difficult time beating gnugo. It is my understanding that skilled go players are not even challenged by go software.
The simplicity of the rules, and complexity of game play, make go a worthwhile study for those interested in computer ai, imvho.
^..^
The AI in FEAR really felt like you were fighting against military-minded opponents; they try and flank you, and generally outmaneuver you with their superior numbers. It makes it much a much more interesting to game to play, because otherwise you'd just be playing a shooter where you have Matrix-style speed.
Even though it's 3 years old, Far Cry still has AI better than 99% of the newest FPS games. They use teamwork to flank you, throw grenades, and even talk to each other.
Most game "AI" is smoke and mirrors. We have neither the programming skill to do real AI nor the time to do the research nor the CPU power required by crunch-intensive mechanisms.
Therefore Deep Blue, or whatever the latest incarnation is, is the most powerful game AI ever, hands down.
I piss off bigots.
Been watching it for 3 years at least, originally its AI was going to be groundbreaking. After getting the game last week, and playing/beating it, the AI was indeed SUPERB, but not groundbreaking. However It is the best AI that I've ever faced. As a group of enemies slowly move from covered position to covered position and outflank me to get a shot, always keeping their heads JUST above say the ridge of a hill to give me the smallest target possible, ducking back behind cover to reload, crouching and walking slowly when trying to be sneaky. It was truly outstanding AI and I Appreciated the hell out of it.
Bolo had the best AI I've ever encountered, in the form of user created plug-ins. Some of them were truly awesome, and presented awesome challenges without what most gamers refer to as "cheating".
Awesome game anyhow, even if the graphics were lame.
Just to add to your comment: I really hate it when I notice that the computer is doing something only a computer can. I don't mean looking at my stats, but just using its speed and the fact that it doesn't have to go through a graphical interface like me. It's what has turned me off most real-time strategy games; even if I designate keyboard shortcuts to groups of my troops, I still cannot simultaneously order my tanks to go to siege position, my scouts to withdraw and fake a side attack, my artillery to start bombarding an area in front of my troops while at the same time fighting an insurrection at the other end of the map and controlling the flow of the resources...
And it bothers me when a computer manages to do just that. If I could micro-manage every single one of my foot soldiers, I would be able to let them attack until only one health point is left and then cycle them for fresh ones, too; but I can only command that many different platoons before it overwhelms me. Giving the computer a fighting chance is ok, but I don't like to be reminded constantly that I could play so much better if only I could control them better, without going through the low-bandwidth channel of keyboard and mouse.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
I got rejected by the blond chick in Cinemaware's King of Chicago. It was so lifelike.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Far Cry has great AI. I don't remember ever going "zomfg the computar is thinking!!!", but the enemies respond in a sensible, coordinated manner -- sweeping areas where disturbances are heard, covering each other, and using weapons intelligently. Far superior to Half-Life (and, credit where credit is due, several years after Half-Life), but also in a much more open-ended game world, where the mobs don't just have to navigate a room full of crates.
The really sad part was when, halfway through the game, they switched from "smart" soldiers, to Doom-esque mutants who just ran straight at you. Ruined that game for me.
Game... blouses.
Operation Flashpoint is among the most impressive games that I have seen when it comes to AI, not necessarily because its the most sophisticated, but because the AI has a very noticeable impact on the gameplay.
No matter how often you replay a mission, it will always come out totally different. This comes in large part from the very open nature of the game, namely there are basically no rooms, its all just one huge outdoor environment and both you and the enemies can go basically wherever they want. It also comes from the way the missions are designed, there are no soldiers that jump out from behind a rock to shoot at you, instead the enemy soliders just follow their routine, they walk their paths, drive a convoy along the road or whatever they have to do right now. Thanks to the large area, they don't have to walk on a stupid 10 meter long path and then turn around to repeat it over and over again. This all leads to a very realistic feel, because all the limits of classic FPSs are removed. Its also not you against 100 other, but often more like you + 5 team members against 10 other, so its a much more even match. In Operation Flashpoint the player is also completly equal to the enemy, one good targeted shot and you are dead, no 100% health that slowly goes done while enemies die on the first hit.
Another aspect that is noticeable in Flashpoint is that there is a very clear difference between the state of the enemies, you can easily tell when they are on patrol, when they are attacking you and when they are searching for you. If you shoot at them they will notice it and react appropriately, this also makes it easy to tell when they don't notice you, i.e. you can hide rather well, a tank won't see you when you are crawling directly infront of it, etc. As a player its simply easy to tell what the enemy is currently doing, since the animations and behaviors are rather distinct for each of the actions.
Last not least Flashpoint is also a game where you need your teammates and where they are not just stupid cannon fodder. Most of the time your teammates can take very well care of themself and you don't have to babysit them like in some other games (HalfLife2...).
All that said, the AI in Flashpoint is far from flawless, it can often be a nightmare to get your group to mount a vehicle or get to a certain point, they will do what you want, but when they crawl around for a minute before entering the vehicle it can get pretty annoying. But overall Flashpoint really is among the best, it is however not just the AI itself that does the job, but the overall game design that threads players and enemies basically the same, it also helps a lot that the whole gameworld is interactive, if you see a tank, then you can drive it, there are no artificial barriers, no pre-scripted events that happen outside of normal gameplay rules. That scripting that is there blends perfectly into the normal gameplay.
"No, but I've rarely encountered games where it feels like my human opponents are really thinking, either." thread over, LOL.
They did a superb job modeling 'combat psychology'. This made the games more than just 'fun'. I found I could apply my military training, e.g. in how I'd set up a defense, and find that the bad guys would react in ways that sometimes surprised, but always made sense.
Hearsay alert
It's my understanding that Atomic went under because they were first bought, and then stiffed, by Microsoft. I think they were bought by Microsoft, and I understand that relationship was terminated a couple years later. Atomic was subsequently acquired by another game company. (Aspyr?)
So if Keith Z, et.al. are out there, Thanks for all the great games!
dave
Oblivion's radiant AI seemed to impress me. Even fighting they were somewhat smart.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
The "squeeze off a few rounds and then give the player a turn" method of FPS AI. If the pause was a fraction of a second, you could call it burst fire and say it was to improve aim. But usually it lasts several seconds, and it looks nothing short of batshit-insane.
If you need to do something to throttle your NPCs, make them miss, tie their shoelaces, take an urgent phonecall, or anything except "stop firing and wait". If they're going to do that, they might as well turn their guns around and blow their own heads off, for all the good it's going to do them.
The soldiers from the original Half Life was the first time I was like "WTF!!" More specifically, it was when I took cover behind a barricade and I heard one of the soldiers say, "Over there," and then I saw a grenade come flying over the barricade at my feet. Yeah, I know it's not super A.I. but 10 years ago it was pretty impressive. Odd that HL2's A.I. is not as good as the first one.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Near the end, the computer greets Falken, to which he replies: "Hello, Joshua."
Circumcision is child abuse.
http://www.nerogame.org/
it would be nice to have these ai's trained for, say, ioquake3
I adored the original Ghost Recon. Whilst by no means perfect, few games have impressed me as much as setting up a careful ambush, watching an enemy squad come down the hill on the first map, walking casually, looking around but little more... then I sprung my trap too soon, half their squad dropped to one knee to provide covering fire whilst the others ran forward then they swapped, moving in on me, defending themselves.
A quick reload and a substantially different fire fight later and I was sold.
Then there was the squad mate AI. They may or may not have been the smartest I've ever come across. It didn't matter because I finally had proper control in the greatest squad mate control system I've yet found. Absolutely no pure AI squad mate system to date can handle the nuances of you telling everyone to go prone, only fire if fired upon, then move in to circling positions around an enemy entrenchment while one guy readies his anti tank launcher, pops up, fires, then drops down while his squad mates mop up the survivors.
Add in a stealth system that actually involved differing perception ranges for the enemy and you had an amazing AI simulation whether much of it was AI in the classical sense or not.
And then, after XBox users couldn't wrap their paws around the controller properly, they wrecked the entire series for more commercial appeal. A true shame, ruining the nuances of a truly great game.
Oh, and one round was all it took - meaning that AI felt like it mattered. If you can run in to a horde of enemies and keep shooting because you're frenzied, have a ton of armor and are doing quad damage with a rocket launcher, enemies carefully flanking you don't matter in the least. If a single enemy creeps around behind you and puts the one round that matters in to you, the AI becomes vastly more dramatic.
I agree with you about the importance of good ally AI. To tell the truth, I really don't notice enemy AI a whole lot, irrespective of whether its good or bad. In games with bad ally AI (ie, most of them), however, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The very best friendly AI I've ever seen is in Star Wars: Republic Commando. Your three teammates really seem human, and they're actually an asset in a firefight. In nearly every game, I find myself protecting the AI more than I find them helping me. One of the things I love about RC is that, if I get killed, my AI buddies can actually finish the fight and revive me on their own.
Farcry had one of the best AI for a FPS game, that is of course without using event scripts a la call of duty. I yet want to see a AI that makes human type of mistakes based on environement. I would love to see an AI that would make stupid actions, based on morale failure, fear or panic
I've noticed that Call of Duty 1 and 2 do this too. Its probably necessary for those games since both spawn enemies behind you when you aren't looking. They just sit there until you turn and look at them, then become active. Once you notice it, it becomes dreadfully annoying and the smart AI suddenly seems awfully dumb.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The most impressive AI I have seen have come from TA Spring. Those ai's were open sourced, and they have some amazing algorithms.
The AI of an opponent in a skirmish is exploitable like any other game, BUT the AI of the individual soldiers is impressive. It feels like you've got individual real humans there more than any other game where they are purely mindless resources to send towards your opponent.
Oh please...a bunch of students trying to recreate a video game that was released before they were born, who don't have the source code or even live in its country of origin, are hardly worth consulting about its AI. Further, I doubt they even own a Pac-Man and probably only played a real machine a few times, if at all. As a current Pac owner who dumped a glut of coins in those machines as a kid, I can tell you there's nothing "random" about the monsters' movements at all. (At least not in the 3 original U.S. firmware releases.) If any character made random decisions, patterns would not be possible to develop; but they were developed, which spawned an entire industry of "how to play video games" books at the time.
"Most games, such as those released with the source engine, require pre-built paths for such things to even occur, and even then, it's usually scripted. In stalker however, it is obvious that such paths cant exist, for the world is far too large. Just processing such paths would slow the game to a crawl."
Numerous tactics can be employed to complete the game, such as rushing, using stealth and sniping. The NPCs will react in a different way to each of them. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s NPCs plan ahead by "Goal-Oriented Action Planning" in order to achieve this.
FEAR uses the same technology. Read the links someone posted above. The AI is supposed to be improved in the expansion pack.
Far Cry definitely has some pretty impressive AI. By far its the best AI I've come across in an FPS so far.
Pong has and always will have the best AI ever.
For myself, it was the original syphon filter for the PSX. I remember one evening where a roommate of mine was stuck at one point in the game in a narrow hallway, with two 'bad guys' a little further off in a larger room. For whatever reason, the (sometimes) flaky AI was at its pinnacle at that point, and managed to keep him occupied for god-know-how-many retries. One kept him buttoned down with gunfire, and the other tossed grenades if he tried to get closer. All in all, it took him about an hour to get past that point in the game... personally I found it hilarious. I don't find that a lot of games have 'impressive' AI, and that most developers tend to rely on complex level designs in the attempt to make up for a lack in AI. (Mind you, I couldn't do any better myself, so until the field of artificial intelligence undergoes a major breakthrough I don't think we can blame the programmers.)
The AI in the original Bases Loaded for the NES thought like many real humans do (at least in some situations). I remember that I'd often try to send a message to Fendy by pitching him inside and backing him off the plate, but sometimes I'd "miss" and bean him, which resulted in him charging the mound to beat the crap out of my pitcher. I've seen a few major leaguers do it just like that, and they're the best in the business, so I say that's good AI.
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Who remembers the game Starship Titanic? It was a spinoff from the Hitchhiker's Guide universe. The AI with the bots was remarkable for its time. The graphics weren't too shabby either.
I don't think the Command and Conquer AI "cheats" went by unnoticed. I can't speak for the majority but among friends and fellow gamers I spoke to, the money "cheat" was pretty blatant if you took advantage of the fact that the map would remain completely revealed after being explored once. I can't count the number of times I would tear apart enemy harvesters only to look inside the enemy base and see half a dozen tanks/buggies/humvees/apcs/flame tanks clustered around their weapons factory/airlift and an impossible to manage for a human number of infantry units.
You didn't exactly play "against" the AI, and it wasn't impressive in terms of decision-making, but the variety of actions coupled with clever "schedules", the huge dialog trees and the interconnected stories created a pretty good illusion of a living world, with believable characters. Considering this was the DOS era, when games came in floppies and CPU speed was measured in MHz, it was pretty impressive stuff.
And 15 years later we have Oblivion, where the "characters" move around aimlessly and all say exactly the same irrelevant lines. Something went terribly, terribly wrong along the way...
Those AI planes sure know how to get from point A to point B. You should watch them do missed approaches...very impressive.
Last night I was playing call of duty 2 and one of the German soldiers picked up the grenade I threw at him and chucked it back at me. That was a surprise :D
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As a game developer, I can tell you that we often do have enough CPU to do something like a neural net, but they are not used much except for some very specific things (AI drivers in racing games, for example).
The problem with neural nets is that its hard to get them to do what you want. You can try to provide the right kind of inputs and then train it and then either "freeze" it in a good configuration. You could even let it continue learning as it plays against the player (but that is dangerous, as it can learn nonsensical behaviours or become very unbalanced skill-wise).
Game developers prefer simpler things that they have more direct control over---such as state machines. State machines are very simple and well-understood. You can make the states and transitions to do anything you want (with the right tools, non-programmers can do it). Its easy to test all the behaviour of the state machine. If it's doing something you don't like, its easy to debug it and alter it to fix the behaviour. Etc.
Neural nets are interesting, but they are no silver bullet. Simpler, more deterministic mechanisms are easier to work with (and often cheaper in CPU too, which is always nice). A state machine doesn't have to be dumb--you can have an AI with 200 states that communicates with its buddies using blackboards or some kind of message passing mechanism.
As always, the hard part about game AI is not making an AI that's smart enough to beat the player. That's relatively easy! The hard part is making the AI "look" smart, while actually acting dumb enough that the player can defeat it. You want to challenge players but not frustrate or overwhelm them. If there's 5 enemy AI guys shooting at one player at once, he dies fast. So you make the enemies take turns shooting at him (just force the AI enemy to choose a different action any time it wants to shoot but one of the enemies is already shooting). The other enemies can lob grenates, or shout "cover me!" and run randomly between cover positions, or any other entertaining thing that doesn't result in the player being ganked while his attention is on the one enemy still shooting at him.
This sort of stuff can easily end up a bit too easy or a bit too hard---so you need an AI that is "tweakable". State machines are tweakable. Neural nets, not so much.
LOL.. captcha = physics
I was already laughing myself silly, and then once I mentally appended "+5, Informative" I seriously laughed until a little turd dribbled out my asshole.
Seriously. For the love of shit. Mod parent post up.
Humm i would say that unreal (the first version) had something that you probably could call ai, but i don't know how it's done. Some creatures, such as the Skarij tried to evade when you shoot at them, they also tried to escape when their health was low..
In Doom3 i was a bit disappointed about the AI (most creatures were really stupid), excepted the soldiers.. In quake4 the group AI sometimes work well and is quite impressive..
The AI in Red Steel was a bit strange, sometimes it does not work at all and sometimes it's quite amazing. For example when you kill a lot of enemies, some will surrender. But then you have to make sure that they drop their weapons and you take it, otherwise they may attack again.
I was really impressed with the creatures' behaviour in black & white - both in doing what you did, and do what you say (sort of).
The enemies in this game are probably not particularly intelligent, but they do feel very human. In many racing games, enemy cars just try to go as fast as possible. In (at least some) Burnout games, though, they are aggressive and downright evil. Try to overtake them, and they'll try to push you into oncoming traffic or smash you into walls. If you're going into turns and they're behind you, they'll try to push you so you oversteer. I thought that was pretty cool and added a lot to the games.
The AI in this WW2 Combat Flight Sim is very good, it simultaneously controls many ground, sea and air objects which autonomously attempt to fulfill their objectives. Its good enough to make the game play very immersive and to support reasonably realistic historic scenarios. You can set the individual skill levels of enemy and allied objects. It's compelling enough that I fly with an online squadron [ www.tangmerepilots.co.uk ]. The AI is good enough that even our best players are still very regularly shot down, it's easier to play against human players of average skills.
when I realized that the AI was simply building cities on every single piece of buildable ground. Every AI civilization seems to do this. Kind of takes the fun out of playing the game when you know you're just going to face an unending series of city sieges.
Obviously the best AI was the opponent for the strategy sim "Global Thermonuclear War". It could even learn from its own mistakes. Very impressive, considering the state of AI when it was released.
Shall we play a game?
Don't put advice in your sig.
It builds upon the Operation Flashpoint code, which, as has been already noted in this thread, was some of the best FPS AI to ever come out. The really nifty thing that has been added to an already unpredictable AI is a much better algorithm for flanking. Kinda spooky the first time that it happens to you in such a wide open environment. :)
:) ArmA's website
:)
OpFlash had some of the best replayability that I've ever seen due to the unbelievable support for bug fixes from Bohemia Interactive, huge maps, unpredictable AI, and completely open set of editing tools that BI makes available. A large and very creative modding community grew up that is still active six years after the game's initial release.
Armed Assault takes that incredible legacy then adds even larger possible maps (400 square kilometers) and far more destructible objects (estimated 1,000,000 on the island that ships with the game). If you haven't seen the game yet you are in for a real treat.
It's not yet officially available in the U.S., although a deal has been announced for Atari to be the U.S. publisher. That announcement also mentioned a ship date some time in May. If you're interested and don't want to wait that long, gogamer.com is taking orders for the UK version to be shipped to U.S. addresses.
Disclaimer: My only association with BI is as a very satisfied customer. I bought the UK version of OpFlash when it first came out, then the GOTY edition with the addon bundle again last year, then ArmA from gogamer.com last month.
I can't remember when I've actually thought of AI as a real opponent; it's always just been another part of the system, another obstacle to overcome. Stack boxes, move bricks, don't get sniped, etc.
But, play Halo (and Halo 2, and Halo 3). The AI still sucks by your standards, but it's employed in a game which has a plot which allows your one guy to be badass enough to go against an army and win -- even an army with superior firepower (which they don't always have). And the monsters are placed such that an area can be incredibly challenging, even with truly pathetic AI, yet the AI that's there does occasionally cooperate in interesting ways to take you down.
It's not about making AI such that one bot can put up a good fight against one human -- especially considering that would make for a short and uninteresting game. It's about making the AI seem intelligent enough to scare you, while actually being stupidly limited.
I remember hearing a story about the LOTR movie -- Battle of Helm's Deep -- all of those orcs and people managed by a massive AI program, which they had to tweak quite a bit to allow the final charge of the riders of Rohan -- too much one way, and one human rider wiped out the entire enemy force. Too far the other way, and the entire charge just went SPLAT against the wall of orcs. If it's that hard to tweak AI against AI, how do you make a challenging AI for a human to play against -- challenging, but not so obscenely overpowered that no human can beat it?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Without a doubt, my vote goes to Microsoft Office. Specifically, that devious little rapscillion known as "Clippy". The developers managed to give him a horribly irritating personality, which fit so well with his innate ability to figure out the one facet of Office that I was completely uninterested in at the moment, and start yamering on about it.
I always wondered, back in the dark ages of computing, what it would be like to type a letter with Steve Urkel reading over my shoulder. Hats off to Microsoft - they captured the feeling perfectly.
I'm not a game programmer or developer, but I've been playing games as long as I can remember. I am a bit surprised that the Black and White series was not mentions at length, as it has probably one of the more advanced AIs in modern games. Your pet creature begins life not knowing how to behave and follows your examples as it grows to gain its own behavior model. The villagers also respond in various ways depending on various factors.
I'm a bit surprised that more games havent taken the ALICEBOT or some other chat-bot built to try to beat the turing test and used them for game non-player characters. Believable AI is one of the best things you can do to make a game immersive and 'real', and most companies dont give their AI enough time.
Spaceward Ho! had the only real AI. Seriously nasty nasty nasty... or maybe it was the high consumption of beers with many friends in the same game and room. Any way, we were in mortal fear of the AI's.
Long live Spaceward Ho!
*WHOOOSH*
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The most impressive ai of all!! The ai's work in teams, go look for you, take cover, go heal, run for ammo, can drive cars, fly planes , fly choppers, drive tanks. Most FPS shooters use massively scripted ai, Armed Assault is one where you can script ai AND just let it do it's stuff. When they engage you they split up squads in subsquads trying to flank you, different squads communicate and pass your location, the ai reacts to sound, danger (eg friendlies getting shot), injuries, vision, the whole lot. A great example is: just put ai's on a map in editor and watch, you'll c a battle unfold that's never the same. It's a pity this is a relatively unknown game, it beats the crap out of all other shooters in terms of scale and ai. The military even uses it in a special form, known as VBS. Check it out, you'll be amazed. http://www.armedassault.com.com/Go to website
Operation: Inner Space. Not sure why, but I really felt for those little flying ships.
Few months ago I discovered a wargame called "Conquest of the Aegean" with a very exciting AI. No script at all, no cheat at all, and could decently handle every maps (even players creations), by simply "understanding" what an objective or a threat is. He knows how to define simple tasks (defend, assault, delay, retreat) and execute them properly. AI limitation comes to lack of anticipation and complexity for the CPU to handle strategic situation better than a human not pure dumbness that we usually see in games. So at least, when you beat him (which occurs time to time), you're feeling smarter than him, not sorry to have find another flaw in the AI design.
When you read about the guy who make the game (he was almost alone on this task), he did not come with strong mathematical theory or algorithmic fundamentals, but with pragmatic view of what the AI should do, some skills to implemented them properly, a limited but well defined field of application (world war II wargame), and a well-crafted game design at the first place.
My experience is that :
The mobs in WoW are so intelligent, that they emulate humans incredibly:
1. Ignorance: Like people walking down a street when a mugger is mugging an old lady, the mobs ignore all other attacks on fellow beings.
2. Predicitability: Like normal human beings, they act in entirely predictable ways given the same circumstance. The person goes to work in the morning and gets stuck in traffic, they are suprised. They are equally suprised and annoyed all subsequent mornings when stuck in the same traffic.
3. Emotional Distraction: When their attention is finally grabbed, the human being will focus on nothing else but the focus of their emotion. To the extent of running their car into a pole whilst watching the scantily clad Night Elf Huntress.
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Black and White. The 1st one. The beast's AI and learning process is amazing
Pong!
I always say that the most impressive friendly AI I've ever seen in a game was in the Freespace series. Unlike Wing Commander, where your wingmen were just fodder, the Freespace series had smart AI pilots that DID something other than draw fire.