The Hard Science of Making Videogames

twoblackeyes writes "PopSci delves into the 10 greatest technical challenges faced by game developers today, and the technology that will hopefully make them a thing of the past. At the top of every dev's wish list is increased realism: realisitic fire, water, enemy AI, material physics, etc. Here directly from the developers where the tech stands today, and where it will likely be tomorrow. '4. Artificial Intelligence - Problem: Once upon a time, the bad guys in videogames wandered around mindlessly, shooting at you while they waited to die. That doesn't cut it anymore. Players demand sophisticated enemies to fight and reliable in-game allies with which to fight them. Thing is, it's freaking complicated, and it eats up processor speed. "We're faking just enough smarts to make it work," says Mathieu Mazerole, lead engineer on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Status: Imbuing characters in a game with lifelike decision-making ability involves employing the kind of high-level logic theories--learning decision trees, mobile navigation, finite-state machine models--used by top robotics engineers.'"

Comments

Not Quite.

[David L. Koenig]

The article should be renamed from "10 greatest technical challenges faced by game developers today" to "10 greatest technical challenges faced by first person shooter game developers today" Contrary to popular belief, not all game developers are striving for photorealism.

Re:Why not?

[provigilman]

If yes then when enemy is in throw range throw grenades until grenades == 0 or enemy == 0.

You can counteract this then by hopping in and out of throw range until the enemy runs out of grenades. Also, what if there are multiple players, some in range of the grenades and some outside grenade range but within weapons range. Plus, what about novel tactics? Retreating out of a room and tossing a grenade behind you? Effective use of smoke grenades instead of just frags?

If you've gotten to the point where you have to ask that, you've already too far. Ask yourself why you as the designer are giving grenades to the guards inside the art museum.

So then a player can simply negate grenade wielding enemies by retreating into the art museum? Or will the enemy pursue but fail to use grenades even if all available weapons are out of ammo?

Why would he need to decide that? He'd use his weapon until it was empty or the enemy were all killed. Then the decision comes in to look for other weapons or to play dead.

You ever play a multiplayer game? Your buddy next to you with the Rocket Launcher dies, you have an SMG and you're fighting a Tank. Do you honestly just sit there and plug away with the SMG while you're standing next to a Rocket Launcher? Of course not! Conversely, what if he had a Sniper rifle? It's normally a superior weapon, but is it still superior in that particular situation?

Nope and that's the point. The tactics the PLAYERS will use will have to CHANGE each time they play because the tactics the enemy will use will have changed.

But they're really not. If the enemy picks one of two options regardless of what you do, you only need to learn a counter for each of the two options. Now, if you're crouched in cover with a Shotgun, you have the charge covered, so you only have to worry about when they take cover as well.

But imagine instead that the enemy starts tossing grenades in an attempt to dislodge you from your cover. Or one enemy pins you down with automatic weapons fire while his allies flank you from the sides, staying well out of range of your shotgun. Or what if they toss out some smoke, then move up while you can't see them? Or better yet, you're in a warhouse and one of them goes up onto the catwalks to get above and behind you in order to flush you out into the waiting sights of his buddies?

These sorts of things are what a player would think of, but current AI won't...and the AI you described certainly won't. Adding a couple of simplistic scripts with a random choice between them does not an AI make. Creating enemies with their own personalities, preferences and play styles that react to what tactics the player is using in a realistic and inventive fashion is the future of AI. It's also what human players do, why do you think multiplayer deathmatches have been (and continue to be) so popular?

Re:Only a worthless fluff piece like this

[PlusFiveTroll]

People that can be put anywhere and act "smart" are still a ways off...

Re:Only a worthless fluff piece like this

[ultranova]

The problem with water is that people tend to think of water as a jello like object, when it really needs to be modeled like a think gas.

Nah. Low-pressure gas can be modeled as independently moving particles which don't interact with each other, just the environment. This gets realistic enough spread, and you can easily add scripted events (like poisoning, snuffing out fires, etc) triggered by proximity of such points to anything.

Water molecules, on the other hand, both repulse and attract each other. Basically, water needs to be made of particles which exert a force on other nearby water particles, and experience gravity. The force needs to be strongly repulsive when near each other, then turn to mild attraction when a bit farther, and zero when further than that. Apart from that, you need to take smaller simulation steps when two particles are near, since otherwise you risk one getting shot out like a cannonball.

You could even have a full three-phase simulator to switch particular particles from water to gas mode if they get hot enough (or even into solid mode if they get cold enough).

Of course, if you have the CPU power, you could simply model everything (including the solid matter) from particles and get things like realistic breaking, roof falling down when the walls get damaged, and so on. That's not realistic right now, thought, both because of CPU power and because of level design issues it would cause. Still, just imagine a FPS where the Anti-Matter Laser will set the enemy in fire, throw him into a wooden building through the wall, cause the building to catch (realistically spreading) fire form the flames, and make the roof fall on him because the wall was damaged and couldn't bear the load anymore. Then watch the flesh particles get burned out of blackening bone particles.

Now that is a murder simulator ;).

Now imagine an adventure/RPG game where the entire play area is made from such virtual molecules, allowing you to solve the problems using common sense rather than just pre-scripted solutions. For example, suppose the object is to get to the bottom of a mine inside a mountain, but the tunnels are full of poison gas. Either get a magical poison immunity amulet, or be creative and use a disintegrate spell to blow open the side and let winds (moving air particles) to blow out the poison gas (which would require more realistic gas simulation than I described above).

The future belongs to simulators, not scripting. And I predict that eventually everything will be made from particles, not polygons, since particle systems enable cooler effects and more realistic/believable behavior of materials.