Slashdot Mirror
Infinite Mario With Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
bgweber writes "There's been a lot of discussion about whether games should adapt to the skills of players. However, most current techniques limit adaptation to parameter adjustment. But if the parameter adaptation is applied to procedural content generation, then new levels can be generated on-line in response to a player's skill. In this adaptation of Infinite Mario (with source [.JAR]), new levels are generated based on the performance of the player. What other gameplay mechanics are open for adaptation when games adapt to the skills of specific players?"
But not a whole lot of fun in practice.
Spelunky http://www.spelunkyworld.com/ is a way better example of a platformer with randomly generated levels.
One of the fun part of video games is playing the same level as someone else then talking about it, sharing frustrations and strategies. Once every level is different, this becomes much less easily done.
Thus, if infinitely adaptable levels *do* exist, they should exist as an extended option or potentially an expansion pack to existing games rather than having an entire game based on that.
Whether the level itself needs to change, or if just spawn points, etc, should cause different things/amount of enemies to spawn is another option. I'm reminded of Left 4 Dead and its sequel with the Director system that alters the spawning of zombies and types of zombies based on difficulty and the apparent skill of the players.
or at least the person who packaged it was, they didn't take the .DS_Store files out before packaging up the jar :P
Monstar L
The implementation of some of the monsters is wrong. I died when I tried to jump on a creature which I know can be jumped on.
If you adapt too much, then the player won't feel challenges anymore. And in games challenges are the things that will demand players to push forward the efforts.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Ender's Game...but applied it to a simple Platform Jumper instead of a complicated psycho-analytic roleplaying scenario.
These new enemies are a bitch.
A bullet bill with wings? Horizontally moving piranha plants you have to jump on to kill?
tetris
it's when things get boring. one of the earliest examples of adaptative difficulty is ironmans offroad, but in it is too obvious, as you very soon realize that no matter how fast you drive the gray cpu car will always drive according to your speed - so there's no point in trying to make up a gap, just steady driving untill the last lap and then nitro nitro nitro. one thing I massively don't like is if monster level is just adjusted from your current level, makes leveling up feel like a scam.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Strange game... The only way to win is not to play.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
...and watch the difficulty exponentially rise to reach singularity :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Lotus esprit 3 on the Amiga had a course generator. I didn't find it that much fun though. Especially, for example, when compared to Wipeout on the PS1 where the course designers spent months on the design (they needed to because they had to avoid pop-up).
Human designed levels are much more interesting. Define why, codify, profit.
[Intentionally left blank]
What's the bet that...
10..9..8..7..6..
site gets slashdotted
5..4..3..2..1
site gets a DMCA takedown notice
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
One of the joys (for me) of playing 2D Mario games is learning how a level progresses and eventually being able to beat it though enough practice. If the level keeps changing this is taken away. I think it would be frustrating...
Then again, I did enjoy Diablo II.
.: Max Romantschuk
You can have randow generated maps + repeteable.
Using the same seed for the random generator, you could make all the copys generate the same levels. If thats your win.
So you can have to option "Standard Campaing" and "New one", with the first option using a fixed seed, and the new one using a fresh seed taken from the OS or the clock.
-Woof woof woof!
You didn't try to jump on a hammer brother and get smacked by a last-second hammer, did you?
Or you can also accidentally jump a tiny bit in front of a creature and die that way.
Mind you, I haven't played this version, only the original.
Adaptive monster levels is one of the reasons games are becoming boring excercises in flat-out grinding.
Where is the challenge? Challenges consist of you having to adapt - to learn a new skill, to become quicker, smarter, better. That is one part of the equation. The other is drama. Drama consists of changes in suspense. If everything is equally easy or equally hard, there is no drama in the story, it all becomes flat.
So a game that is always "at your level" or even always "just ahead of you" is neither challenging, nor interesting. This is doubly true for free-exploration games like Oblivion (one of the earliest mods available was to remove the auto-levelling).
In a railroaded game like most sidescrollers or FPS, a certain level of adaptation might save the player from the frustration of having to try the same sequence for the 100th time. But most current auto-adaptation fails in picking out when the player needs some help and would enjoy a reduced difficulty and when he is enjoying the challenge and doesn't want the game to be dumbed down.
So, until the time we get true AI, an explicit difficulty setting (bonus points if it can be changed mid-game) is still much preferable.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I read his source code. It's a good rough draft but plenty of flaws. For instance, his probability depends on rand.nextDouble(). I personally do not like that he extends Level, this will couple his code to any changes to level. It also violates plenty of good software coding standards. He also did not provide a test class for his implementation.... :-| His code is a good rough draft but needs plenty of revision. Since there is no test class, he probably should start from scratch.
I though I am not *that* bad at Super Mario World, after playing this implementation...
First and foremost, I found it strange to move with the right hand and jump/run with the other (A,S keys).
Second, as you say the "physics" are not completely the same. For example the jumping on the turtles for a second time won't have the same effect as in the real game.
And you can do a "ninja Gaiden" jump when you fall in a pit... that is also not in the original.
Nevertheless the idea is interesting...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
This adaptive mario could never think up a level as evil as Tubular. I pulled my hair out on that one many-a-time. This game is actually pretty hard to play, though; partly, because I don't have an SNES controller, and partly because there is no natural flow to the levels as there would be with manually created ones.
The earliest example I know of was a direct predecessor of Ivan Iron Man -- Supersprint.
It was a bit more subtle, though. The enemy cars got faster from track to track, but they did so based on the time it took you to complete each track. The trick to completing the game was therefore to get a good lead, come to a halt in front of the finish line, wait for the other cars to catch up a bit, then win by a small margin. The enemy cars stayed slower and each subsequent race was easier.
AFAIK, this tactic was applied in most arcade racers during the 80s, so that players would get a good "in" on playing, and they'd come back. They would make progress, so they'd come back. But they wouldn't finish the game as quite as if it was fixed difficulty, so they'd keep coming back, maximising the income from the machine.
A cynical money making plot? Nope. We came back because we enjoyed it. Compare with Virtua House of the Rising Taxi Cops in your average modern arcade. Difficult from the get go, so if you're not a current good gamer, there's little point in putting your coin in the slot.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Um... we've kind of had this kind of difficulty adjustment in some form or another for last thirty or so years. Think back to games like Pac-Man that became faster and more difficult as the levels got higher. Heck, even Tetris did the same thing.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
It's a bad idea I think because it encourages the player to perform worse in general than he would otherwise. I remember the shoot-em-up SWIV on the Amiga did this. It was actually a good idea to lose a single life just before the really tricky bits. In the end, you saved more lives this way.
Instead, how about we use these things called "difficulty levels"? You know, like easy, medium, hard etc., and then it's up to the game creator to make sure a consistent challenge is maintained throughout the game.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Its been done before.
Jesus Christ, dude.
Was this not on windows 95 with that game diablo already, self changing levels so no 2 runs are ever the same, therefor you theoretically never get bored...
I watched the video, and the impression I got was more of AI failure. The levels don't appear to get anywhere near the level of Super Mario Forever or Kaizo Mario World levels. At 0:29 there's a turtle duck close to a gap, but they didn't make the gap wide enough that the turtle duck is required.
Because we all know how real life adapts to each persons abilities. Now, it would be pretty sweet if my grocery store would learn which items I buy (they have this info because I use those damned rewards cards) and would rearrange itself so that all of the items I wanted were in one place. This, of course, would suck for everyone else that shopped there.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
Worse than spinys are the bullet bills with wings. They are just like spinys, in that you die when you jump on them. But in addition, they flash, so they are tougher to see.
The toughest part for me is when I would just spontaneously die. Maybe it was a bullet bill appearing out of nowhere, or maybe it was an invisible enemy. But that is when I stopped having fun, after about 10 minutes of playing.
I also dislike the controls. Not the button layout, I could change that easily with a new keymap or even use my gamepad with joy2key. Mario jumped shallow and fell quickly.
I worked on a drill-and-practice computer-assisted-instruction system, where we jumped through amazing hoops to keep the students at about 80% right, ratcheting up the difficulty if they get to 85% on any skill, and slowing the pace on other skills where they drop below 75%. It worked amazingly well; I was stunned to see kids lined up on Saturday morning to get time to do arithmetic exercises.
Well it has to stop getting harder at some point. If it was me playing it, I'm pretty decent so it'd either have to spawn something unbeatable like a floor to ceiling brick wall or stop getting harder.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Come on, be nice. I'm just an AC
Needs some further work. After playing for awhile, the bad guys stopped showing up all together. Next, the jumps started getting so long that Mario cannot span them.