Agreed. You can have a great MP experience with anyone, as long as you communicate.
Anyways, the whole article is uninformed trolling, to be honest: check this out
FTA:
"I'm also dubious about online competition being better than offline. It seems to me that if a computer were able to record a human playing and duplicate it, so that you thought you were playing against a human, you probably wouldn't know the difference. I think the real issue here is the AI in most games not acting human enough. It's a problem that I believe this generation of games may solve.
"
At one point, one of my coworkers was engineering a complex driving mechanism for the tanks in our game. They had gears, and everything - so that when they went uphill, they would slow down a bit, downshift, gain speed again (to a lower maximum) etc...
It was a shame the player was flying and had no chance to notice such detail!
FEAR uses this to really good effect. They called it Goal Orientated Action Planning - you can look up their presentations on gamasutra. It's a super-interesting system - your AI is given a Goal (kill the player being an obvious one) and has several actions that can achieve that goal - including things like Call for Backup, Change Weapon to Something Stronger, Throw Grenade, etc etc.
The "cheating" part is the problem, there. There's nothing inherently wrong with a dynamicly adjusting difficulty level - it's just crude implementations that make it really obvious and steal the fun from you. It can be done, it just takes finesse...
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment is a really hot topic in games at the moment. Choosing a difficulty level is just soooo last gen;)
Some really horrible examples are seen in most racing games - ever notice that if you want to win at Mario Kart, it's best to not be in first place on the final lap?
The techniques are becoming more sophisticated though. The biggest danger is currently that it's really hard to get the challenge "just right" - when balancing games, the smallest adjustment can make things swing really wildly... so you often end up with a game that is oscillating between too difficult and too easy.
I'm a game designer, working on a next gen title, specifically focussing on AI. (yes, it's at e3, and yes, i'm exhausted as a result! excuse any incoherence...)
Here's my perspective on things.
First, you really need to focus on a genre. The gameplay desires and thus AI desires are completely divergent between, say, a Poker AI and an Racing game AI. There are some commanalities though, which I think lay in an interesting area to be studying...
The point is that your opponent should be human.
All too often, game AIs are purely robotic. You can't surprise them. You can't outwit them. They don't show cunning, they don't show fear, they don't interact with each other - they lack emotions.
Having a bot in a FPS is all well and good, but if at the first sound of a footstep behind it, it whips around with perfect precision and starts firing - it is next to useless. It won't satisfy a player - it doesn't give the same thrills as sneaking up behind a human player.
Study the behavior of humans in your chosen genre: see how they react, the ways they interact, the ways they try to play the game against each other - and use this as a foundation for building an AI.
I think there is a severe lack of emotional response in current game AI. Building an opponent with emotional model, that directly affects their chosen actions, would lead to some interesting results.
Of course, good AI is nothing without an appropriate means of displaying the results... for instance, back to the FPS - if you can't tell the difference between a bored opponent and an alert one, the player will never appreciate your efforts!
Yeah, except the Quebec courts upheld the non-compete before when Tremblay spearheaded the enforcement against his former employees...
How he could have expected to not have this thrown at him is a mystery. There is news in the pipeline though, expect to hear from Tremblay on the matter soon! (I've only seen the French news report so far, it'll get anglo press soon)
Fair enough on the price points, although i'd suspect it'd just be a graphics card mod, so closer to $300 for most... either way, yes - it's a rediculous thing to have to consider.
HDCP is only required for full resolution HDDVD playback, not for vista itself... that statement in the article was a little misleading. It's clarified later on.
Games consoles have a thriving hardware modding scene going on... ok so most end users dont do the soldering themselves, but it's easy enough to find someone who will...
Once someone abuses Copyright (like, say, by eliminating fair use/controlling playback through the DMCA), they are actively stopping the promotion of the arts and sciences.
Eh?
I was with you up until you said that. How on earth does eliminating fair use equate to a movie studio stopping promoting the arts? In case you missed the money trail, it starts with a bunch of people putting a lot of cash behind a studio + production team, who then making a movie... That'd be the promotion of the arts going on right there. Fair use really doesn't come into it.
Now ok, I suspect you're going to argue that the customers buying lots of product A set up product B for production: however fair use issues are largely irrelevant here as well. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy the movies. Anyone who buys a movie in several formats does so out of *choice*. Anyone who similarly shuns a new format does so out of choice. The investors, similarly, choose to reinvest and lend their support to the arts and sciences.
So, seriously... how do you tally your argument? How does eliminating fair use "actively stop" the promotion of the arts and sciences? Or to put it in a different way: how does having fair use actively promote the arts?
While those Americans may not directly communicate their beliefs they way I am able to explain my own, it is most likely because they simply haven't though about it at any length, and if they had, would agree with me.
What is possible, is to make an "AI" that reacts too fast.
Agreed, strategy games are a nightmare for AI. But they show also what I mean in this case. "Too good" means an AI that isn't fun to play against... and usually very little actual "I" and too much "A"
For instance in a strategy game, typical cheats include: not using the Fog of War, not having to use resources in the same way as the player, not having the same control restrictions as the player. So the computer player is always in the right place to fend off an attack, has enough of an army built to do it, and can weild control over the entire map at once. At this point, you have to "dumb down" the AI to make it playable...
Sure, it's not really AI at that stage... but the definition is pretty fast and loose in games anyways.
Thats a big issue with working in the games industry - you have to be willing to up and move to where the jobs are. Not everyone is, for entirely understandable reasons...
Kind of. It's not just working out the individual behaviors that characters exhibit, but also coming to the programming team with a system of how the decisions can be made to chose these behaviors appropriately. Game design of any kind is a negotiation as much as anything though, so I'm not there to force solutions on people.
So, while I do effectively storyboard character behaviors I also head into more technical design as well. It definately helps to have a technical background, and I studied (lightly) AI topics at university so I have a decent grounding to work from. I also make an effort to constantly communicate with my programmers, as they are experts at what they do as well. My overarching aim is to make sure the AI is fun, not force a particular implementation.
As to creative freedom, there's plenty. I'm expected to stay true to the franchise (yes, it's a sequel... i know, i know...) but more importantly I'm expected to make a fun game. So, as long as I can convince people my plan is going to produce something awesome, they go for it:)
I wholeheartedly agree with your points, other than:
it's hard to design an AI such that you can 'turn a knob' and take the AI from weak to average to strong to expert playing levels.
Maybe it's because I have a background in designing systems that scale well, but to me this is something you address at the start and it becomes easy... everything from range of tactical choices at the macro level to quality of play at a micro level can be tuned.
Yeah, I guess the solutions are specific to a particular game... but the techniques themselves transfer between games, genres and generations.
This is a kind of reverse fuzziness, in a way... and yeah, it works. You're taking a well understood set of inputs, and giving a fuzzy set of outputs (hence the reverse bit).
If you have a system that piles up all the possible choices into a nice neat line, with the best choice at the front of the line, you introduce stupidity by not choosing at the front of the queue.
It's actually pretty easy to make AIs that are too good, too smart. The difficulty comes in making them stupid enough to be fun to play against....
I'm an AI Designer for a major developer / publisher...
I have a background in CS, but I'm not a coder - I'm a designer. One of the more technical designers out there; that's a big factor in why I'm doing AI design.
My background definately helps. I can communicate with the coders using terms they are comfortable with - they don't have to "dumb down" their thoughts to make a concept work for me. However, being a Designer means I'm not actually doing the coding: I design the systems, the desired end results. As such I use a wide range of skills and knowledge, from psychology and sociology to modelling and HCI.
I suspect your question is actually "how many of the people out there coding AI have a typical CS background..." The answer in my experience is most, although I've worked with people with specific degrees in AI as well. Mostly people end up doing AI in games because it interests them, and they worked hard developing their skills in that area. Actually, that answers your second question as well - if you want to work for an "actual organization doing AI" then you can, if you want to make games, go for that instead. Depends what path you choose to pusue, assuming you can push yourself far enough to succede.
But, if I've got you wrong and you actually want to do the design side of AI... you're aiming to be a games designer. There have been a few stories here about how to break into the industry, and I remember seeing lots of cogent advice - go check them out. Once you're established as a designer, specializing is only a few titles away...
Shame this is really hard to get across to the consumer.
There's a really good track record of games that looked brilliant but played poorly selling well; very few manage to look bad, play well and sell amazingly.
(I'd say your off mark with the comment about the art directors getting huge chunks of cash, btw - replace with Marketting and you're bang on the money. In a typical dev studio, the top programmer will earn as much / more than the top artist - depends on the studio tho, admittedly)
That was one of my favorite gaming moments, ever. In Riven (Myst 2) I was stuck on a puzzle for ages - I ended up in a classroom, where there were loads of toys to play with and so on. Eventually I clicked that their number system was different, and suddenly I had solved the puzzle. Brilliant game design.
I have to disagree with your point about games fostering ignorance because they are essentially black boxes.
First, several older games - particularly the ones that made a technical revolution in one area or another - have had their source opened up. Ok they tend not to be the educational titles... still.
The vast majority of educational titles are pretty simple; any teacher worth their salt could direct an inquisitive child into the right areas to start recreating what they've seen. You don't need the source of a particular game to learn how to start programming for a game; there are plenty of resources out there.
Interactive media is considered the future of education because it's simply more involving for the children. Rather than expecting kids to be passive information sponges, they can explore a subject at their pace, follow tangents that interest them (within topic - whole different discussion there) and play an active part in their own education.
It will probably never fully replace the value of a good teacher, but educational software will certainly make the teachers job easier (allowing a good teacher to reach more kids?) and the education more compelling for kids.
Dismissing educational software because it's proprietary is just daft, sorry.
Definately, the concept of leveling as it stands in most mmorpgs would have to be rethought... but there are other things to consider as well.
More important would be to address the question of how you die. If certain characters could perform "saving moves", having perma-death could lead to much better balance between characters, and a need for balanced parties. Dieing should be something that's fairly difficult to do, unless you ignore the warnings and foolishly try to conquer the world on your own.
If it's implemented well, I can see perma-death working in just about any style of MMOG. Most of the arguments against it stem from "i don't want to lose what i've built up" - people value their virtual posessions. As long as the players know that there is a way to avoid that loss, and that their choices are going to be the ones deciding their fate (no magic giant feet squishing them at random!) it is a workable concept.
Personally, the chance of it all going horribly wrong would make it much more interesting. And the respect value of meeting a character who has been alive for so long would be a lot higher...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyways, the whole article is uninformed trolling, to be honest: check this out
FTA: "I'm also dubious about online competition being better than offline. It seems to me that if a computer were able to record a human playing and duplicate it, so that you thought you were playing against a human, you probably wouldn't know the difference. I think the real issue here is the AI in most games not acting human enough. It's a problem that I believe this generation of games may solve. "
Laughing. My. A**. Off.
So very true!
At one point, one of my coworkers was engineering a complex driving mechanism for the tanks in our game. They had gears, and everything - so that when they went uphill, they would slow down a bit, downshift, gain speed again (to a lower maximum) etc...
It was a shame the player was flying and had no chance to notice such detail!
FEAR uses this to really good effect. They called it Goal Orientated Action Planning - you can look up their presentations on gamasutra. It's a super-interesting system - your AI is given a Goal (kill the player being an obvious one) and has several actions that can achieve that goal - including things like Call for Backup, Change Weapon to Something Stronger, Throw Grenade, etc etc.
The "cheating" part is the problem, there. There's nothing inherently wrong with a dynamicly adjusting difficulty level - it's just crude implementations that make it really obvious and steal the fun from you. It can be done, it just takes finesse...
Very true. Without sophisticated display, sophisticated algos just end up looking like junk...
Ultimately it doesn't matter if your character is thinking a million things, if it can only show you one.
Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment is a really hot topic in games at the moment. Choosing a difficulty level is just soooo last gen ;)
Some really horrible examples are seen in most racing games - ever notice that if you want to win at Mario Kart, it's best to not be in first place on the final lap?
The techniques are becoming more sophisticated though. The biggest danger is currently that it's really hard to get the challenge "just right" - when balancing games, the smallest adjustment can make things swing really wildly... so you often end up with a game that is oscillating between too difficult and too easy.
I'm a game designer, working on a next gen title, specifically focussing on AI. (yes, it's at e3, and yes, i'm exhausted as a result! excuse any incoherence...)
Here's my perspective on things.
First, you really need to focus on a genre. The gameplay desires and thus AI desires are completely divergent between, say, a Poker AI and an Racing game AI. There are some commanalities though, which I think lay in an interesting area to be studying...
The point is that your opponent should be human.
All too often, game AIs are purely robotic. You can't surprise them. You can't outwit them. They don't show cunning, they don't show fear, they don't interact with each other - they lack emotions.
Having a bot in a FPS is all well and good, but if at the first sound of a footstep behind it, it whips around with perfect precision and starts firing - it is next to useless. It won't satisfy a player - it doesn't give the same thrills as sneaking up behind a human player.
Study the behavior of humans in your chosen genre: see how they react, the ways they interact, the ways they try to play the game against each other - and use this as a foundation for building an AI.
I think there is a severe lack of emotional response in current game AI. Building an opponent with emotional model, that directly affects their chosen actions, would lead to some interesting results.
Of course, good AI is nothing without an appropriate means of displaying the results... for instance, back to the FPS - if you can't tell the difference between a bored opponent and an alert one, the player will never appreciate your efforts!
Yeah, except the Quebec courts upheld the non-compete before when Tremblay spearheaded the enforcement against his former employees...
How he could have expected to not have this thrown at him is a mystery. There is news in the pipeline though, expect to hear from Tremblay on the matter soon! (I've only seen the French news report so far, it'll get anglo press soon)
Before we get to that question, answer me this:
Why is it - SPECIFICALLY - that we need a national ID card?
The UK government's justification for them has shifted so many times it is rediculous...
Hmmm, Falklands perchance?
Do I get a cookie?
Fair enough on the price points, although i'd suspect it'd just be a graphics card mod, so closer to $300 for most... either way, yes - it's a rediculous thing to have to consider.
HDCP is only required for full resolution HDDVD playback, not for vista itself... that statement in the article was a little misleading. It's clarified later on.
Games consoles have a thriving hardware modding scene going on... ok so most end users dont do the soldering themselves, but it's easy enough to find someone who will...
Eh?
I was with you up until you said that. How on earth does eliminating fair use equate to a movie studio stopping promoting the arts? In case you missed the money trail, it starts with a bunch of people putting a lot of cash behind a studio + production team, who then making a movie... That'd be the promotion of the arts going on right there. Fair use really doesn't come into it.
Now ok, I suspect you're going to argue that the customers buying lots of product A set up product B for production: however fair use issues are largely irrelevant here as well. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy the movies. Anyone who buys a movie in several formats does so out of *choice*. Anyone who similarly shuns a new format does so out of choice. The investors, similarly, choose to reinvest and lend their support to the arts and sciences.
So, seriously... how do you tally your argument? How does eliminating fair use "actively stop" the promotion of the arts and sciences? Or to put it in a different way: how does having fair use actively promote the arts?
While those Americans may not directly communicate their beliefs they way I am able to explain my own, it is most likely because they simply haven't though about it at any length, and if they had, would agree with me.
Wow, by the way... you should be in politics.
Agreed, strategy games are a nightmare for AI. But they show also what I mean in this case. "Too good" means an AI that isn't fun to play against... and usually very little actual "I" and too much "A"
For instance in a strategy game, typical cheats include: not using the Fog of War, not having to use resources in the same way as the player, not having the same control restrictions as the player. So the computer player is always in the right place to fend off an attack, has enough of an army built to do it, and can weild control over the entire map at once. At this point, you have to "dumb down" the AI to make it playable...
Sure, it's not really AI at that stage... but the definition is pretty fast and loose in games anyways.
Thats a big issue with working in the games industry - you have to be willing to up and move to where the jobs are. Not everyone is, for entirely understandable reasons...
Kind of. It's not just working out the individual behaviors that characters exhibit, but also coming to the programming team with a system of how the decisions can be made to chose these behaviors appropriately. Game design of any kind is a negotiation as much as anything though, so I'm not there to force solutions on people.
:)
So, while I do effectively storyboard character behaviors I also head into more technical design as well. It definately helps to have a technical background, and I studied (lightly) AI topics at university so I have a decent grounding to work from. I also make an effort to constantly communicate with my programmers, as they are experts at what they do as well. My overarching aim is to make sure the AI is fun, not force a particular implementation.
As to creative freedom, there's plenty. I'm expected to stay true to the franchise (yes, it's a sequel... i know, i know...) but more importantly I'm expected to make a fun game. So, as long as I can convince people my plan is going to produce something awesome, they go for it
it's hard to design an AI such that you can 'turn a knob' and take the AI from weak to average to strong to expert playing levels.
Maybe it's because I have a background in designing systems that scale well, but to me this is something you address at the start and it becomes easy... everything from range of tactical choices at the macro level to quality of play at a micro level can be tuned.
Yeah, I guess the solutions are specific to a particular game... but the techniques themselves transfer between games, genres and generations.
This is a kind of reverse fuzziness, in a way... and yeah, it works. You're taking a well understood set of inputs, and giving a fuzzy set of outputs (hence the reverse bit). If you have a system that piles up all the possible choices into a nice neat line, with the best choice at the front of the line, you introduce stupidity by not choosing at the front of the queue. It's actually pretty easy to make AIs that are too good, too smart. The difficulty comes in making them stupid enough to be fun to play against....
I'm an AI Designer for a major developer / publisher...
I have a background in CS, but I'm not a coder - I'm a designer. One of the more technical designers out there; that's a big factor in why I'm doing AI design.
My background definately helps. I can communicate with the coders using terms they are comfortable with - they don't have to "dumb down" their thoughts to make a concept work for me. However, being a Designer means I'm not actually doing the coding: I design the systems, the desired end results. As such I use a wide range of skills and knowledge, from psychology and sociology to modelling and HCI.
I suspect your question is actually "how many of the people out there coding AI have a typical CS background..." The answer in my experience is most, although I've worked with people with specific degrees in AI as well. Mostly people end up doing AI in games because it interests them, and they worked hard developing their skills in that area. Actually, that answers your second question as well - if you want to work for an "actual organization doing AI" then you can, if you want to make games, go for that instead. Depends what path you choose to pusue, assuming you can push yourself far enough to succede.
But, if I've got you wrong and you actually want to do the design side of AI... you're aiming to be a games designer. There have been a few stories here about how to break into the industry, and I remember seeing lots of cogent advice - go check them out. Once you're established as a designer, specializing is only a few titles away...
Err, care to back that up?
Libraries that have been ordered to turn over information are *not allowed* to tell anyone about it. Not the suspect in question, not the media.
http://www.aclu.org/patriot_foia/foia3.html
Check point 3.
There is no way to independantly verify any of the released statistics... /tinfoil hat
Shame this is really hard to get across to the consumer.
There's a really good track record of games that looked brilliant but played poorly selling well; very few manage to look bad, play well and sell amazingly.
(I'd say your off mark with the comment about the art directors getting huge chunks of cash, btw - replace with Marketting and you're bang on the money. In a typical dev studio, the top programmer will earn as much / more than the top artist - depends on the studio tho, admittedly)
That was one of my favorite gaming moments, ever. In Riven (Myst 2) I was stuck on a puzzle for ages - I ended up in a classroom, where there were loads of toys to play with and so on. Eventually I clicked that their number system was different, and suddenly I had solved the puzzle. Brilliant game design.
I have to disagree with your point about games fostering ignorance because they are essentially black boxes.
First, several older games - particularly the ones that made a technical revolution in one area or another - have had their source opened up. Ok they tend not to be the educational titles... still.
The vast majority of educational titles are pretty simple; any teacher worth their salt could direct an inquisitive child into the right areas to start recreating what they've seen. You don't need the source of a particular game to learn how to start programming for a game; there are plenty of resources out there.
Interactive media is considered the future of education because it's simply more involving for the children. Rather than expecting kids to be passive information sponges, they can explore a subject at their pace, follow tangents that interest them (within topic - whole different discussion there) and play an active part in their own education.
It will probably never fully replace the value of a good teacher, but educational software will certainly make the teachers job easier (allowing a good teacher to reach more kids?) and the education more compelling for kids.
Dismissing educational software because it's proprietary is just daft, sorry.
Definately, the concept of leveling as it stands in most mmorpgs would have to be rethought... but there are other things to consider as well.
More important would be to address the question of how you die. If certain characters could perform "saving moves", having perma-death could lead to much better balance between characters, and a need for balanced parties. Dieing should be something that's fairly difficult to do, unless you ignore the warnings and foolishly try to conquer the world on your own.
If it's implemented well, I can see perma-death working in just about any style of MMOG. Most of the arguments against it stem from "i don't want to lose what i've built up" - people value their virtual posessions. As long as the players know that there is a way to avoid that loss, and that their choices are going to be the ones deciding their fate (no magic giant feet squishing them at random!) it is a workable concept.
Personally, the chance of it all going horribly wrong would make it much more interesting. And the respect value of meeting a character who has been alive for so long would be a lot higher...