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A Look At the AI of Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2
mr_sifter writes "The newly released Empire: Total War and F.E.A.R. 2 have both been praised for their excellent AI. In this feature, Bit-Tech talks to the developers behind these games about how they handled the challenges of creating Empire's armies of thousands of AI soldiers and F.E.A.R. 2's aggressive teams of military operatives. The discussion also talks about how game AI is 'smoke and mirrors' compared to research AI, and looks at the difficulty of improving the quality of game AI."
We talked about F.E.A.R. 2's engine and AI back in December as well.
I would revel at the day when the AI is more human like which would tremble upon sighting my avatar, run to the ends of the map at the sound of my bullets, curse me, and log out.
Hi, :-(.
i love the Total War Series. But the AI in ETW is a complete disappointment. I see no enhancement compared to MTW2. The opposite is true, there are so many AI bugs that battles agains the AI are close to pointless. I slaughtered enemys at the border of the battlefield, standing with theit back towards me. I micromanage my own units because grouping tends to produce strange results. Due to this, battles are a lot more point&click-work currently. I'm waiting for a patch
Sincerely yours, Martin
The AI in Fear 2 was terrible! Well, if it was good, I didn't notice because it was so god damned easy to play that it was more a case of "Hi, *slomo* bye." .. firefights were so short that if there was amazing AI under the hood, I completely missed it.
On the parts where I didn't use slowmo, again, nothing remarkable, and I'm not exactly an amazing FPS player either.
For an NPC to decide on its next action, it will usually have to query the world for a tonne of information, and most of that information is conditional on a previous query result.
I'll believe him, but he's obviously talking about Bethesda games.
Elder Scrolls / Fallout NPCs have a hojillion options available to them. They can sleep, eat, pick up objects, converse with other characters (NPC or the PC), go home, go to work, go to the store, equip clothing and weapons, fight, run away et cetera. All this requires a lot of knowledge about the time of day, all of the objects and characters in the NPC's immediate environment, and some information about other locations in town.
In an FPS like FEAR the options are much more limited. Essentially an NPC can choose between fire, throw grenade, take cover and run away to regroup. All he needs to know is the location of his enemy/enemies, maybe the locations of his allies and the location of potential cover.
In an RTS not even every NPC needs AI; you only need one AI per computer-controlled faction. Their options aren't as limited as in an FPS, but they don't need that much dynamic information about the world either: the map is mostly static, only its own and its enemy's locations really change.
TL;DR: What works for Oblivion doesn't necessarily have to be useful to other games.
I've always thought that a never ending march towards smarter AI would go something like this:
The Past:
No real AI. Enemies know where you are at all times, and simply make a beeline for you. To the player, the enemies seems to always know where you are and make a beeline for you.
The Present:
The enemies are no longer allowed to know where you are. Instead, simple AI makes basic decisions about how to act when you walk right in front of it. To the player, the enemies seem stupid.
The Future:
The AI now has advanced heuristics which allow it to take prompts from the environment and knowledge of your probable goals to judge your probable location by using 50% of your CPU power, and use advanced physics engines and inverse kinematics to take a realistic route to get to you, using the other 50% of your CPU power. To the player, the enemies seems to always know where you are and make a beeline for you.
"So when you hide behind cover 5 germans will chuck grenades at you so you have to run for other cover at which point another 5 will throw more meaning you have to run back to where you were assuming those grenades have blown up, all whilst dying repeatedly anyway because enemies kill you in only two or three shots on veteran. The fact they just plaster the area with 5 grenades often left me feeling little difference to the "hard mode" of old in many past games where the enemies were made harder by simply making them automatically aim at you and do rediculously high damage. The additional "intelligence" simply added nothing to the game."
Well in a real war if the enemy wanted to be a douche about it? Then yes they all could be chucking grenades at you. Especially if they're set on "hard". Seriously think long-range weapon. Pick as much of the enemy as you can and then mop up closer. Now i would say that AI is improving and thank God for that. For example your teammates in GRAW1 are a bunch of idiots. Occasionally handy but mostly dead because they wandered into the line of fire. Graw2 doesn't require as much micromanagement and hence your jobs easier and they're more useful.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
They were doing this during the Wars of Scottish Independence. Haven't you seen Braveheart?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Empire: Total War uses online activation (through Steam), so if you buy this and you don't have an Internet connection all the time in your gaming PC, or you upgrade components on it or you upgrade your OS or any other arbitrary condition (which can change at any time at the whim of one of the suits at Creative Assembly) then you've just threw away a nice chunk of your fun money.
Where the hell are you getting this from? Why do you think that activation on Steam precludes you from upgrading your PC, changing your OS, etc? And why do you think that "arbitrary conditions" from Creative Assembly will stop you from playing the game?
FYI, Steam needs you to go online once to download/activate the game, and after that, you're pretty much free and clear. Every few weeks your Steam "ticket" will expire, and you'll have to go back online for all of 5 seconds to log in again. You can install it on a different PC. You can format & reload, and re-install it on the same PC. You can go from XP to Vista to Linux/WINE to the Windows 7 Beta, and Steam will allow you to install your game. (Whether the game itself will run well/at-all under certain environments is a different matter, but also not related to Steam.)
Some Steam games come with third-party DRM. I don't think Empire is one of them, but I haven't checked. Far Cry 2, X3: Terran Conflict, and GTA IV are all examples of this unfair and burdensome "extra DRM" but I don't feel it's fair to blame the store for the decisions of the publishers. I don't blame my local bookstore for, say, the content of an Ann Coulter book they carry.