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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Adaptive AI in Games - Does it Really Work? 128

Posted by Cliff from the reacting-to-you dept.
qasimodo asks: "I was recently reading a preview of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, and then I came across this article at GameSpot saying Pandora Tomorrow will feature adaptive AI which 'will adjust itself to players' skill level'. I remember (and is also mentioned in the PT article) Max Payne also featured this, but I never noticed it. I guess that's the best way to know if it works, since it adapts to your gaming skills, but does it really work? Have you noticed it? Do you have proof of it?"
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Adaptive AI in Games - Does it Really Work? More

Adaptive AI in Games - Does it Really Work?

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  • Shandyometer! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flat Feet Pete ( 87786 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @03:56PM (#7894422) Homepage Journal
    I remember reading an article about Gods by the Bitmap Brothers where they had helper triggers for people that had been stuck for a few minutes. They called it a shandyometer, after shandy drinkers obviously.

    X-Com had a shandyometer, my old housemate used to send men who were very poor and irritating out, let them get slaughtered, then send in his main team and the game would have made it easier.

    (For the non-Brits, Shandy's a mix of lager and lemonade (as in 7up/sprite), the old lore is that its drinkers are somehow unable to handle real beer)

  • Descent 3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @03:56PM (#7894430) Homepage Journal
    Descent 3 always had adaptive AI. I remember when I first played it. I had played the prequels so I went into 3 with the same strategy I always had. It got me through quite a bit of the game, but it wasn't easy. Early in the game I was able to fly around really fast picking enemies off one at a time. As I played more they started to run away, regroup and attack in force. I countered that strategy by using bigger guns to destroy them. They then started to change formation to minimize the damage I could do to their whole group. While Descent 2 was the pinnacle of the series Descent 3 had revolutionary AI.

    Also, I think that the sea battle AI in puzzle pirates could possibly be adaptive in some way. A couple updates ago they allowed brigands (computer controlled boats full of booty) to fire canonballs. Since then it has been widely agreed upon by players that they have increased in difficulty each and every day. There was an update last night, so we'll have to see what happened. I'm still a little unsure of this because if the AI was adaptive in some way, wouldn't they tell us?

    • Re:Descent 3 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      > While Descent 2 was the pinnacle of the series Descent 3 had revolutionary AI.

      Actually, the AI in Descent 2 was fairly impressive in certain ways, though you
      wouldn't usually notice it most of the time. The thing that caused me to first
      notice it was in a level that I was creating. I'd positioned three Diamond
      Claws (the nastiest/scarriest of the melee bots) together at one corner, which
      was just past a fly-through trigger that tripped a producer at the opposite
      end of the hall (behind you). You could l

    • Adaptive AI (Score:3, Informative)

      by ThePyro ( 645161 )

      I'll be the first to praise Descent's great AI, but I honestly don't think it's adaptive at all. Doing a search yielded no pages that indicated an adaptive AI. I even found an interview with one of the developers, and although AI was discussed briefly, no mention was made of adaptability.

      The Descent robots were definitely smart - they could find you ANYWHERE in a level, could call for reinforcements, and some knew how to sneak up behind you when you weren't looking. But they didn't adapt to your pla

  • It had better give you a score based on how tough you were.

    I made an adaptive pong game once. Almost anyone could beat it. If you sucked enough, the computer's paddle would essentially stop moving altogether. If you were very good, it would predict exactly where the ball would land and become unbeatable.

    • Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)

      by IamNotWitchboy ( 563675 )

      If there was a point where it became unbeatable, then it was not very good at adapting, was it?

      The essential point in adaptive AI on games is to be difficult enough for anyone to be entertaining, without getting frustrating, or the opposite, that it's so trivial to beat it that it becomes uninteresting.

      • I doubt I ever got it to play unbeatably though, as I myself am not unbeatable. The game just went on forever anyway so there was no winner or loser in the absolute sense. It was like a practice mode for when you're not playing humans.

      • Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jonadab ( 583620 )
        > The essential point in adaptive AI on games is to be difficult enough for
        > anyone to be entertaining, without getting frustrating

        I think you want the player to get *slightly* frustrated *occasionally*. Not
        badly, and not often, but if the player always wins without putting in some
        extra effort, that's no fun either. When the player's tactics and skills
        stagnate, you want to start beating him some of the time. (Not all of the
        time. Not, even, most of the time, I think. But some of the time.)

        One wa

        • I think you want the player to get *slightly* frustrated *occasionally*. Not badly, and not often, but if the player always wins without putting in some extra effort, that's no fun either. When the player's tactics and skills stagnate, you want to start beating him some of the time. (Not all of the time. Not, even, most of the time, I think. But some of the time.)

          I think that was the essence of my point, just worded differently

          Tetris is a great example of a game that can become infinitely hard. Is

  • Adaptive AI and it's drawbacks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheRoachMan ( 677330 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @04:04PM (#7894533) Journal
    After reading that little snippet on gamespot, I've got the feeling that the game will be 'letting you win'. It states that if it takes you 20 tries to do something, the game will lower it's standards for you. Why did finishing Splinter Cell make me feel good? Because it makes me feel I've accomplished something. I've mastered the game, no matter how difficult the timing was, no matter how pixel-perfect I had to aim to kill that guy, no matter how hard it was to master. Unless they (Ubisoft) implement this Adaptive AI perfectly and unnoticeable (and I hope they will), I'm going to feel as if no matter how bad I play, or how crummy my timing is, I'm still going to master the game. Adaptive AI could really take the challenge out of any game.

    • However (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @04:17PM (#7894739) Homepage Journal
      What's the main reason players get disinterested in a game? Because they come across a level that they can't beat, and they get sick of the same ol' stuff over and over again.

      If less people are buying these games, because they just aren't the master that you apparently are and would rather not get halfway through the game only to quit in frustration, it hurts the company so this move makes sense.

      However, to satiate you, they should add an option to set the AI on the hardest possible skill level.

      • Re:However (Score:2, Informative)

        by Acidic_Diarrhea ( 641390 )
        I agree. That's an easy fix to the problem of people not feeling like they earned it - simple options screen selection could just turn off the adaptive gameplay. One thing I would like to note is that this isn't AI. Detecting how many times a player has failed and lowering enemy health or making enemies less sensitive to movement is not AI.

        The field of artificial intelligence is nowhere near having a good handle on simulating thought but Splinter Cell isn't where the breakthrough has come. And I'm not tryin

        • Once it's obvious how to do something that at first blush seems like an "intelligent" thing to have in an automated system, it suddenly becomes "not-AI".

          Face recognition? Oh that's just statistical analysis, that's not AI.

          And so on, and so on.

          It's AI, either because it's a smart behavior that you didn't expect it to exhibit (you being the player), or because you didn't have to show it explicitly what to do in each situation (you being the programmer).

          I think that's about as good as a useful defintion we
        • That would depend on how the game actually goes about determining you suck and adjusting it's gameplay.

          Let me give you a clue, being AI does not exclude and will certainly include analyzing statistics and responding by adjusting variables. The minute analyzing comes into play and it's something artificial doing it, THAT IS AI. Whether it's very bright or not is irrelevant. I know human beings that aren't as intelligent as Splinter Cell.

          I do however believe that thanks to people like you, NOTHING will e
      • I want Weenie Level. It keeps me honest.
      • What's the main reason players get disinterested in a game? Because they come across a level that they can't beat, and they get sick of the same ol' stuff over and over again.

        I stopped playing Infocom's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" because I couldn't open the fucking door (about 1/2 hour into it, on the Vogon ship). Yes, if it was adaptive, I would have given that game more time.

        And I worked at Infocom in high school!

    • Then perhaps selective AI is better left as an option for now?

    • The counterpoint to that is that the game has to be perfect, in terms of not punishing you by interface.

      Splinter Cell, for example, like many games, had quite a few points where you had to die to figure out how you should have acted. Hell, one of the opening missions, where you need to sneak past some cops shaking down a drunk, there's too much sillyness. The cops can't hear you grunting and wheezing as you go past, hand to hand, but if you climb up too fast, you're hosed.

      Prince of Persia: Sands of Ti

      • BUT prince of persia has the ability to wind time back so if you have to die twice to figure something out, that still makese sense within the logic of the game.

        • Yes, to a certain point. But I think they still took it too far.

          It also doesn't help that a) they have to show you a walkthrough, basically, to get you through the levels, and b) very often, I found, a pole you were supposed to grab was difficult to make out against the wall, or a jump that looked too long was doable, while a jump that was doable looked too long.

      • That's not the same thing, though. Making something a "two-try" situation is not the same thing as adapting to the skill level of a player... all this "two-try" does is make you think "Well... THAT wasn't the right way." It doesn't change the difficulty of the CORRECT path in any way, shape, or form, and this is what adaptive AI is about (at least, from what I've seen.)

        • Yes, I know, and that's the problem.

          Besides, most 'adaptive AI' is of the 'lower the health of the beastie that's whipping the PC's ass' or 'increase it's accuracy to Godlike levels' style.

          What it SHOULD be is 'PC likes to crawl along ceiling pipes and rain down death from above, so watch the ceiling' or 'PC goes for head shots for quick kills, so bust out the helmets' or 'PC likes to shoot out the lights, so bring floodlights into a room we think he's going to, wait 45 seconds after he shoots out the l

    • While that may be true for many people, the converse is probably true for many people as well. I never finished Splinter Cell, because I kept getting stuck in the exact same area, forever. After a few days of trying, I realized that while I was spending my time in the game, I wasn't actually enjoying myself, I was just getting frustrated and angry. It's bad enough when I get frustrated or angry at work, but using my free time voluntarily to get into a bad move struck me as a pretty bad idea, so I quit th
    • Why did finishing Splinter Cell make me feel good? Because it makes me feel I've accomplished something. I've mastered the game...

      There are an increasing number of single player games, even console ones (Metal Gear Solid 2 for the PS2), that let you upload your record to the internet after you have completed a game. In the future, "Hardest AI" may share a spot on online ranking ladders next to fastest time and most head shots.

      By making it a goal to do so well that the game gets harder, you are adding a

  • I'm surprised this is getting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tickenest ( 544722 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @04:24PM (#7894893) Homepage Journal

    as much attention as it is. After all, I believe it was NBA Jam which introduced this concept, though they called it "CPU Assist". Essentially, a player who was losing would get more and more help from the computer as his deficit grew and grew, making his shots much more likely to go in and letting him knock opposing players over much more easily. On the flip side, a player with a big lead would find most of his shots hitting iron, and his players would lose the ball and get knocked over if opposing players even looked at them.

    I also recall reading many years ago in an issue of Sega Visions (Sega's failed answer to Nintendo Power) that the Jurassic Park game for the Genesis would have "Dynamic Play Adjustment". The only example I can recall of this is that if the player was doing well, gaps to jump would get wider. I'm sure there were other examples, but that's the only one I remember.

    So, in other words, this ain't new.

    • Re:I'm surprised this is getting... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @04:43PM (#7895230) Journal
      Ha! Kids these days.

      Try at least as far back as Astrosmash [intellivisionlives.com], an 1981 Intellivision game.

      It keys the difficulty to the number of extra lives you have. At the lowest level it's almost impossible to lose, and extra lives are handed out generously.

      I think it's actually good in a way they backed off from this; once you start playing this game it's hard to stop, because you almost inevitably have to leave a game in progress, either by powering off or by deliberately dying enough times to lose, which is about as easy psychologically.

      This is at least a candidate for "first", though I wouldn't be surprised if someone comes up with an Atari 2600 game that used it (before 1981).

      I'm also somewhat surprised the arcade games didn't do more of this; this dynamic difficulty level is much more addictive then the monotonically increasing (and always huge) difficulty employed by modern games.

      • Hah! You're right. But come on, give me credit for at least not thinking that the history of video games begins with the Nintendo 64.

        Check it out [intellivisionlives.com].

      • I'm also somewhat surprised the arcade games didn't do more of this; this dynamic difficulty level is much more addictive then the monotonically increasing (and always huge) difficulty employed by modern games.

        Although it definitely helps the profitability of an arcade game to be fun/addictive, one has to remember that the point of an arcade machine is to keep the player plugging those quarters in. If they made it too difficult to lose the game, you'd never put any more money in.

        The trick is to some
        • "And yes, I know it's been a damn long time since arcade games cost a quarter, but I'm a child of the 80's :-)"

          That's true, nodays the coin slots are mostly just for looks. After all, why bother charging yourself a quarter? And it's not like there are Arcades anymore.

  • Its nothing new (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 5 Second Rule ( 670510 )
    Maybe its becoming more sophisticated in games like Pandora Tomorrow, but as a general game design concept, it's been around for a while.

    The concept is mentioned in Rules of Play [amazon.com]. Although I don't have it accessible right now, the example they used was in Wipeout XL (but could be any other Wipeout game for that matter). If your racer took a spill in the first lap and the AI of the computer racers didn't change, you'd have no chance at making it back up to the front of the race. However, because Wipeout X
    • This was also used in F-Zero X for N64. The difference between driving the game like a grandma and an expert had on the AI was as much as 50 seconds on the AI's total race time. Also, I recall a vector game I used to play on MAME every now and then that had a setting on the dip switch for difficulty called "Adaptive". The game was from the early 80's, so it was probably one of the first attemps at such a thing in video games. Unforunately, I didn't notice any difference between the difficulties when playing
      • Not to mention Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 (maybe Double Dash too, haven't played it much). Maybe it's just because I had gotten quite proficient at the games, but the adaptivity just pissed me off. I would lead an entire race, fending off multiple attacks from racers who I should've been going faster than, only to get passed at the last second by Toad when I'm flying top speed with Wario.

        I hear Diddy Kong racing didn't have this adaptive AI stuff, so if you had a lead, the computer wouldn't cheat
        • I don't know if I'd call this adaptive. In fact, I tended to just call it "cheap". Adaptive would be more like if you tend to shoot shells behind you, and the computer keeps a shell handy at all time to counter that shell
        • Yeah, Diddy Kong was great...very fair, and the same items always appeared in the same places-- so as long you were more than a split second behind someone, the item would regenerate. Plus you could stack items, up to 3, each level more powerful. Also, great karting, airplanes, and hovercraft modes, and better battlemodes than Mario Kart ever had.

          On the other hand, races among good players tended to be decided in the first quarter of a lap or so, it was TOUGH to catch up. And the tiny pipsqueak characters

  • Max Payne (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArmenTanzarian ( 210418 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#7895194) Homepage Journal
    What that game really needed was a way to adapt to your attention span. When he would launch into one of those speeches about the rain on the pavement and how it made him feel, I wanted to shoot my Playstation.
    • So is it or is it not true that guys don't want to know about feelings? I mean, here's Max Payne, badass extraordinare, taling about the goddamn rain, and here's you, a Slashdot user, getting pissed off at his sojourn into the realm of rain.

      Damn, that made no sense.

  • problem with AI and difficulty (Score:4, Insightful)

    by *weasel ( 174362 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#7895198)
    the catch 22 is: make the game too easy, and players will complain. make the game too tough, and players will complain.

    personally, i don't think a 'difficulty' slider should come into affect with AI. The AI should always -try- to behave the same way.

    Whether you intend for them to be tacticians, civilians, or just mindless grunts. on 'Easy' or 'Difficult' a bad guy should still know he should take cover, call for backup, etc.

    The 'difficulty' should come into play when deciding their accuracy, movement speed, 'scoring' (penalties for shooting hostages, raizing conquested territory, etc). It could also come into play in deciding the scarcity of resources. on Easy, there should be extra resources for the hero, and less for the enemy.

    Adaptive -AI- is the wrong approach. Adaptive -difficult- is still a good idea though. but don't make enemies dumber; just make them slower, more inaccurate, fewer in number - don't give them as many grenades and leave more health packs around.

    oh, and i also don't appreciate the 'difficulty' sliders that just scale the damage you receive up and down. that is an awfully 'cheap' hack imo.

    • Re:problem with AI and difficulty (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nick_davison ( 217681 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @06:42PM (#7896896)
      Whether you intend for them to be tacticians, civilians, or just mindless grunts. on 'Easy' or 'Difficult' a bad guy should still know he should take cover, call for backup, etc.

      I'd disagree:

      A typical civilian is liable to run scared, shoot while running, empty their clip desperately, that kind of thing.

      A regular soldier is liable to call for cover, move to a braced position or whatever for shooting, but still make some dumb mistakes.

      A truly elite solider, the target is probably never going to know they and their squad were there until they are lying dead on the ground. They'll plan tactics in advance, have them well practiced and executed silently. They'll be better at scanning for targets, they'll be better at moving silently through the best areas of cover. When they do move, they'll be covered by an already well placed squadmate. Their communications will be as much via silent gestures as noisy radios.

      Within that spectrum (and me not knowing much about elite forces), there's a huge range of variables for a given enemy. That security guard could be nothing more than a civilian in a uniform on easy difficulty yet an ex special forces soldier on high difficulty. They're still both "just a security guard" yet there's a huge range of differences in how their AI might act.

      Ghost Recon has my all time favorite example of that. On the first mission, if you go around to the north of the valley, there's a slope that troops come down.

      I'd played it once on easy. I managed to clear them all with just a single sniper and good reactions. As soon as they started getting shot, they just tried charging, firing wildly, hitting nothing.

      On elite, the sniper died almost as soon as he gave away his position as half a dozen guys found cover, found him, lined their shots, then took him down.

      Next I took a squad of three guys, including a light MG. I found some bushes near the bottom of the hill. I waited for them to come in to the open, then opened up. Quickly they dropped to the ground. Then they started moving in pairs back in to cover behind a boulder, the others providing supressing fire. As they kept the range between them and I, they were much harder to take down and I got maybe two of the six before they were safe. Now it became a case of do I have to clear them out or will they come after me? They answered that for me and came after me. Yet even then, they maintained great covering fire, from braced pairs who were taking advantage of the accuracy, moving from cover to cover.

      In both cases, they were just about as accurate as before (they just used more accurate firing positions) and could take just as much damage (Ghost Recon is great for accurately handling how much mess a single bullet causes). It was entirely down to their use of tactics that they went from being a group of idiots to mop up to scarily hard adversaries.

      Granted, those were skill settings, not an adaptive AI system. Still, that's what differing AI levels should be like. I can't stand games that differ difficulty by making shots do more or less damage, by simply upping numbers of enemies, by suddenly making enemies perfect shots while they still move in exactly the same way they always did.
      • Personally I'd agree and disagree with both of you.

        For the most part I agree with you, my direct parent poster. I don't believe that more or less skilled players should recieve different amounts of mana from heaven and increased health, or decreased enemy health etc.

        I believe that there should be two basis on which to analyze the player (high level basis that is) skill and intelligence. The two are certainly NOT the same thing, although a player may be skilled and intelligent both. Basically the AI need
        • i don't think i conveyed myself clearly as i think the original responder did not get my intent.

          yes, i think that -reaction- speed should be a factor adjusted by difficulty, not movement speed.

          and yes - i never meant that a civilian should be an expert tactician if you turn a game to 'difficult'. i was suggesting that a civilian should behave like a civilian no matter what the difficulty. just because you select 'hard' doesn't mean that joe-blow on the street is suddenly a kung fu master. similarly a m
    • Adaptive AI is needed for some games, where "intelligence" is a key feature
      of playing the game. (I put "intelligence" in quotation marks because I'm
      using the traditional definition that includes quite a lot of things that
      computers can do, such as examine by brute force all the possibilities for
      the next N moves in a chess game, or test various board positions against
      every single word in a large dictionary in a Scrabble game. If you think of
      intelligence in terms of abstract reasoning and qualitative learnin
    • I completely agree with this man mod him up! If I die I don't want my enemies to just stand there and let me shoot him, a game like that would be boring and dumb. If I'm really that bad I would want the game to help me aim better and kill the opponent more easily, not make them more unrealistic.
      • things like increasing the assistance from 'auto-aim' are ideal for making adjustments in difficulty.

        and particularly, aside from whether it's the 'right' way to adjust difficulty, wasting time coding and testing varying levels of enemy behaviors that most people will never see is just plain waste.
  • I've seen so-called "adapative AI" before. I can't remember what the games which utilised it were called but what I think they did, is take your score and increase or decrease the AI's skill accordingly. Although in SC:PT I think this might be actual in game, instead of calculating between levels. Either way, I don't think its that hard. For programmers, not me.
  • A RTS game and FPS game are two very different beasts, and how the AI acts in those types of games can either kill the game play or make the gmaer keep coming back.

    One thought on this subject is that the game should know what the objectives are and allow the AI engine figure out the best way to achive the goal (as in RTS), which could generate interesting and unpredictable game play. Back when I was playing C&C, I quickly figured out that the AI could not deal with walls very well, which was a very si
    • The C&C AI is easy to beat, build almost nothing, just mine ore as fast as you can and build a shitload of tanks. Make sure your ore is coming fast enough that you can build tanks nonstop, whatever you are doing, it's secondary to keeping the tanks rolling out.

      When you have a sufficient legion of tanks, send them out and crush the enemy. If you don't crush them that's ok, so long as you never stopped building tanks. When you have another legion of tanks send them out. Of course choose your targets
  • AI has it's limits as we all know. It after all is still just a computer and computers, allthough being able to do things faster than humans, cannot act like a human. It still requires the user. Now adaptive AI is a thought, and seems to work well from the games I've played (Splinter Cell, pretty much anything by Tom Clancy), allthough I think there is a limit on not only what the computers are capable of, but also what we want them to do. The whole premise of video games is to get an adreneline rush by do
    • I'm with you on the rest but please tell me haven't bought into this mumbo jumbo that humans are anything more than biological computers?

  • If I remember correctly, (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OgdEnigmaX ( 535667 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @05:16PM (#7895724)
    The "adaptive AI" in Max Payne was simply a dynamic difficulty slider. I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply a matter of monitoring your kill rate, perhaps adjusted by your injury rate, and increasing enemy effectiveness (fire rate, accuracy, maybe damage multiplier if they really wanted to be devious) accordingly. I imagine the AI topped out fairly low, though, so the overall effect was negligible. I don't believe it was adaptive in the sense that it dynamically adjusted its battle tactics according to your battle tactics, as opposed to simple numerical effectiveness.

    Say I tend to shootjump to the right when I head into battle. The AI couldn't care less. Now if it _did_ notice that enemies tended to die more often when I did so, and cause them to proactively fire where I would, statistically speaking, very likely end up, that'd be an AI to write home about.

    The most remarkable AI in modern gaming that I've encountered of late is that of Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution [neoseeker.com] (a bargain at $20 new, btw), in which battle profiles of players in the Japanese arcade circuits was distilled into what prove to be fairly different AIs. Dynamically speaking, the game tracks the areas that you tend to attack successfully (high, middle, or low), whether those attacks are strikes or throws, and whether you won or lost with those percentages...and, judging from its effectiveness at smushing me in the long run, adjusts its behavior accordingly. So while a given AI profile might tend to, say, try to counter middle throws often, that tendency might be further exaggerated as the bulk of my throws tend to come from that area.

    Quite impressive not only for its dynamism but also for the wide and finely graded range of difficulty among the AIs. As you gain ranks in the Quest mode (from 1st kyu to 10th, 10th dan to 1st, and beyond), your opponents very slowly become more difficult such that you can actually observe effective tactics emerging and adjust your _own_ behavior accordingly. Quite a far cry from Street Fighter II, mm?
    • Nitpick... it's 10th Kyu to 1st and 1st Dan to 10th That is all.
    • When did you notice the difficulty start going up? I was 88-2 and got sick of having to win 500 matches to enter the tournament for each arcade. I found the only difference between 1st kyu and 1st dan to be that against the dan, you have to block.
    • "Say I tend to shootjump to the right when I head into battle. The AI couldn't care less. Now if it _did_ notice that enemies tended to die more often when I did so, and cause them to proactively fire where I would, statistically speaking, very likely end up, that'd be an AI to write home about."

      That would be interesting to play against, but I don't think it would be very realistic. Each AI person that you enounter in the game would have no idea what your tendancies were at first. They should not know

  • This has been around a while... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Asprin ( 545477 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (dlonrasg)> on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @05:17PM (#7895742) Homepage Journal

    IIRC, Doom and Quake had adaptive AI, too.

    No, I guess it doesn't really do anything different from a random number generator.
    • Didn't Doom and Quake have user-selectable difficulty levels? Not sure how that would be adaptive, really.
    • Dragon Warrior IV is the first game I can think of that had real adaptive AI, but it was AI on your side... the bad critters never changed but, in Chapter 5, your team members would keep track of "what worked" (seems to just be how close an action was to a kill), and increase the probability of choosing that action. It was a good implementation, too. They started with 5 (I think) user-selectable probability distributions (defensive, offensive, etc), and when a given one was selected, training would only hap
  • Kind of on topic, that they happened to release a new trailer for Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow today also. Torrent: http://www.filerush.com/torrents/splinter_cell-pan dora_tomorrow-trailer2.zip.torrent [filerush.com]

  • State of AI in games (Score:4, Interesting)

    by j-turkey ( 187775 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @05:28PM (#7895926) Homepage

    Considering the advances made in computing, I'm surprised that current gaming AI is still so sucky. It seems that our games have advanced only graphically and in size (I'm thinking world size -- but physical size has also grown) -- largely due to advances in memory and storage media.

    As far as I can tell, AI has not advanced with current technology. I'm reminded of this while playing modern RTS games, where it seems that all computer opponents have similar stratagies, but never seem to ever actually "learn" anything (or even show a hint of adaptability). Of course, this is all purely antecdotal, but not without merit.

    Any game developeres care to back me up? Or am I full of shit on this?

    • I think people are confusing difficulty with intelligence. Use a game like Dead or Alive or Tekken as an example. Increasing the difficulty adaptively would involve the AI hitting faster or using more advanced moves the better you got. That is not adaptive AI, that is adaptive difficulty.

      Adaptive AI in this case would be more like that if you only use a certain set of attacks the AI learns what you are likely to do and defends appropriately. Just like a real person would. These would be the end of using se
    • You are essentially correct, though some RTS games are starting to get some very nice AI. I recently got into the RTS Rise of Nations, and the AI is nicely clever in it. Not super "same as an expert player" smart, but much better than what I find in games like C&C and Warcraft. The fact that only the highest levels of AI cheat, and the game tells you how and warns you, make it even better. Very fun game, too, if overwhelming at first.

      Though even the new C&C Generals has some nice AI for probing def
    • AI has advanced in several fields within games, but there are some reasons why learning AI is usually not used.

      One of the hardest problem is doing leveldesign for an unpredictable AI. Hell, it's hard enough to do leveldesign for those unpredictable players already :). When you give up control over the AI behaviour (and you have to let loose control somewhat when you allow your bots to learn), it's very hard to tell in advance if the bots will learn behaviour which will advance the fun for the gamer. Maybe

      • AI has advanced in several fields within games, but there are some reasons why learning AI is usually not used.

        I spent a little bit of time in college working with AI and evolutionary computation and I can say with very little authority that AI has, in general, come a long way in the last 10 or 15 years. Also, my post was probably more of a semi-ontopic rant than anything else (with very little to do with adaptive AI). Still, I don't consider AI with adaptive difficulty all that far from a strategicly

  • Max Pain in Max Payne (Score:4, Interesting)

    by deblorvayn ( 530515 ) <[michaell] [at] [wizardis.com.au]> on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @05:47PM (#7896218) Homepage
    I can vouch for Max Payne's variable AI working. I played the game through once and thought "This is fantastic." So I decided to play the game through again. The first level was a breeze. I single shot to the headed every single enemy.
    Then, next level, all hell broke loose. The enemies were rolling, took at least four shots each, ducked bullets, hid behind things, shot back very accurately.. they couldn't kill me but I ran out of ammo quick. I never made it past the second level because the AI had jacked up to the highest level.
    If I recall correctly, when you die on a level it lowers the AI's abilities just in case it had them too high.

  • Its Not Adaptive AI (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Zevets ( 728720 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @06:31PM (#7896765) Journal
    It will be Adaptive Difficulty.

    What they need to do is adjust to the players styles. I like to camp and snipe in just about every game. I wish it would then cause the AI to start moving more rapidly, and check sniper spots more often. Do you always do something when you enter a room? Then the AI should brilliantly counter it, so I have to get a new strategy. Do I always camp in the same place? Then nade me.

    Second of all I dont want it to turn pathetically easy, even though every game should have a difficulty setting called baby or wuss. (especially racing games like Gran Turismo) that would let you win. I labored so many damn hours perfecting my skills to no reward in Gran Turismo Three and I want my Formula One cars NOW!!! But what is the fun if I never die and never get hurt and don't get that rush when you complete a challenge. Because when I beat GT3 I will be so happy and thrilled and I will feel my $50 and racing wheel paid off. I will buy GT4, hence a happy customer and money for the corporations giving a financial incentive to the suits.

    What it should do is offer a hint, to really bad players(flash bang a room with possible enemies and friendlies!!). Adapt to my style. If I want to snipe, then those guards better give up the grenades and take up some binoculars and a rifle. If a player is good at one method, make the objectives possible using that strategy, but encourage all the others too! Adaptive AI should enhance game play and make the game last. If I completed the it the first time sniping, and I want to be forced to try close quarters combat next time, without setting something I have not done any harder and make me have to vary my strategies to complete it. If Splinter Cell pulls off what I want, then UbiSoft will be very rich and I will be one very happy gamer.

  • Adaptive AI has porblems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by node159 ( 636992 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2004 @06:49PM (#7896981)
    When playing Max Pain I found out about the adaptive AI the hard way.

    I naturally adapt a one shot kill strategy in most games to be more efficient (less ammo wastage/less health wastage), unfortinatly in max pain this ended up with the first few level being very easy and then suddenly becoming impossible to complete.

    Never the less max pane was religated to the dust bin as I was so fustrated and anoyed by this that I hardly felt like replaying half the game.

    Just goes to show that Q&A testng is vital when implimenting a new tech as this should have most definilty been picked up.
  • So, basically, we're talking about a "pacing" issue, right? It's actually a relatively simple, and often used, technique in videogame AI.

    Create a fitness value for the player based on whatever criteria you feel best indicates the skill level of the player (Time to complete a stage, Amount of damage taken, Accuracy rating, etc.). Measure the player's actual value against some expected value. Then, adjust certain game parameters (Enemy firing rate/accuracy, Availability of health packs, etc.) to compensat
  • I may be wrong about this (it's been a while since I've played it), but I remember hearing once that Killer Instinct had something like this in it. I do remember that certain combos didn't work so well after using them enough times against the computer player.
  • Adaptive AI seems like a good feature for some people. Why not make it an optional setting? Those who prefer the raw AI as it is can play it at that setting, while those who don't want to risk being held back by an overly frustrating opponent have a fallback to ensure gameplay is still fun for them?
  • I was taught on a course the way to keep people motivated is set it up so they get %75 success rate.

    Seems the AI should always move towards that.

  • is that it would just make the computer cheat instead of regrouping and such in the case of Unreal Tournement atleast it would just spawn in a couple of uber bots that could move faster then you could and could hit you if they could see you. Not to mention teleporting around the map at times.

  • Grand turismo had this, and it was really annoying. I'd have a great run, finish some race in 3:20, but take last place. Next attempt I'd take first despite taking 3:50 to finish the same race. Happened all the time, you had to force yourself to drive bad because when you did a good job you couldn't win.

    What I hated most was taking a corner at the fast speed the car could handle, and seeing a car that handles worse pass me on the corner and not spin out afterwards. In other words it wasn't adaptive

    • This is called "rubber-band AI" because it prevents you from getting so far ahead of the competition that you get lonely out there. That's the theory, at least. What it amounts to is that the enemy cheats to make up for poor performance, and that's a frustrating approach to AI development.

      Older versions of Mario Kart had the same problem. Nothing like having a tiny shroom pass your heavyweight (high topspeed) kart like it was nothing. In Double Dash, either they fixed it or replaced it with real AI, b
  • To hell with adapative AI. Gimme multiplayer Spinter Cell! When I got Spinter Cell on the xbox last year I was already hooked on Ghost Recon on xbox live. I was upset when the only live feature of Spinter Cell was content download. From the preview it looks like Spinter Cell 2 is going to have a very very sweet multiplayer mode!
  • There was a boss in soul caliber where my friend said if you let him take 1/3 of your life you could beat him easily. There was also a dm game Q1 I think where you gave the cpu a 19-0 advantage then you could just tear it apart. Both examples are kind of like easter eggs for noobs. Also you can actually tell on the adaptive AI in Max Payne 2 on the Dead Man Walking Levels.
  • This title has been known for its AI to adapt a "handicap" whenever it is getting stomped. Say, for example, that you are three touchdowns up against some poor computer player. The computer player will suddenly make miracle interceptions and unbelivable tackles that cause you to fumble and lose the ball. They will also dodge any and all of your tackles!

    This is not really adaptive AI, but rather, a tweaking of the stat system (instead of an fumble every 40 tackles, its a fumble every 5), but it seems that n
    • I can confirm this for the arcade version of NFL Blitz '99. Another item: if you're a registered user and you're trying to beat all 30 teams, as you get closer to winning all the games you'll suddenly find yourself without being able to enter powerups (that is, the machine will automatically go into 'tournament mode' without actually being told to go into that mode). Blitz doesn't actually learn how to play against you (as a true AI would, for example, notice that the quarterback always fades back and to
  • This game has a really good AI, and speech synthesis is well done.

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