The State of AI In Games 40
CowboyRobot writes "Carnegie Mellon researcher Alexander Nareyek has an article at ACM Queue describing how the role of graphics as the leading technology in gaming is being replaced by advancements in artificial intelligence. The author targets some game AI: 'Early milestone demonstrations for the publisher, press presentations, and other hype-generating events do not promote inclusion of a globally/consistently good AI, but instead focus on one or two 'absolutely unexpected but genius outcomes of revolutionary new and complex AI procedures' (did you spot the ironic tone?) that provide the necessary 'wows'.' He concludes by suggesting: 'we need to see more effort to make AI functionality available for the designers/artists.'"
A.I. (Score:5, Funny)
"I destroy you"
"Cry to your mom. b!cyh"
etc. I mean that was most humanlike characteristic ever to be properly emulated.
Re:A.I. (Score:4, Funny)
<Monty> Thunderbird's data? I am.
<Monty> if (thermostat == snot) { colouring magnifies isometric NBDuckBot;}
<Monty> s/got/go/
<Monty> mobibot currency 549.99 GBP sounds harder than I suspect it'll work server for lesbian bitch porn empire or what Amy likes the uk
<Monty> royal post man quacks at under-valued cucumber?
Pretty good... apparently he uses Markov chaining or something to learn from. He also hangs out on a lot of code-oriented channels.
Now imagine letting one of these loose on several servers for Counterstrike or something and seeing how well they can impersonate a real (l)user after a while.
Re:A.I. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A.I. (Score:1)
So essentially all the bot would do was connect to irc, log in, and (seemingly at random) dump its recv buffer into a channel, raw irc codes and all. Amazingly enough it worked well enough for people to try to netsex it though.
The problem with realistic AI... (Score:1)
AI system from LoTR for mm games? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:AI system from LoTR for mm games? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AI system from LoTR for mm games? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:AI system from LoTR for mm games? (Score:1)
Re:AI system from LoTR for mm games? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AI system from LoTR for mm games? (Score:1)
Nice rebuttal to that "video game crash" article (Score:5, Insightful)
Rob
Re:Nice rebuttal to that "video game crash" articl (Score:4, Interesting)
NPCs would be a welcome addition (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to see intelligent NPCs in multiplayer games. Say, in a FPS you have non combatants running around adding to the mayhem and confusion of battle.
Also, you probably haven't played many online games if you say that human players have more than enough intelligence...I'm very good at FPS games and finding challenging opponents isn't always easy. Finding people willing to take
Playing experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Having read the article, I think that the author seems to forget that though we know have pretty much reached the summit of the quality of graphics, AI is not the only direction that future games will have to be aiming for; I believe physics engines are taking a pogressingly important role in video games, and this is an area which I think developers will concentrate on, as it is showing more and more importance for gamers.
The problem is that now, AI is as "basic" as physics engines are. If you look at the best selling games, they probably have bad AI (XIII comes to mind, that game's AI is hideous) -- and an average physics engine. If you ask me, developers will have to find the balance between developing both, because these elements are becoming big enjoyment factors in player experience, as the players realise that good AI makes for a more realistic experience, and allows the player to progress in several ways instead of having to follow the same, linear route (a feeling which decreases replayability a lot). As for the physics engines, it's just something else which more and more players see as important; just imagine the possibility of great puzzles with a great physics engine.
A game with both great AI and a realistic physics engine ([cough]Half-Life 2[/cough]) just needs some good level design for these to come through, and that is how you will create the ultimate player experience.
The author of the article says the AI is more than just how the NPCs react, but nowadays I think the emphasis has to be put on this type of AI anyway, as it is still kind of apalling in most games. If a game has good AI, it can allow more freedom of choice to the player as the NPCs will know how to react accordingly to the player's actions and decisions. If NPCs are ready to act in "real time" to any situation, it is less a case of the player having to adapt to a game, following a linear route and ending up against a horde of enemies and some prescripted event, but more a case of the game "adapting" to what the player chooses to do, hence giving the player greater freedom and a better experience.
As for the evolution of physics engines, one has to see how important this is becoming; there are so much more progression possibilities for a game with a good physics engine. This allows the player to interact with his/her environment in a much richer way, and use it much more as he/she would like to have it exploited. Coupled with a good AI, this can make for an amazingly realistic game and a much better playing experience, and in my opinion, these are the departments which developers have to aim expanding on.
Re:Playing experience (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Playing experience (Score:5, Informative)
True, but Half-Life does also have team-based AI for some monsters (most notably the marines, the black ops and and the alien dogs). For example, the level designer could designate one of the monsters as a leader and the others would follow its lead. If the player killed the leader first, the rest would disperse and stop fighting as effectively.
Also, the monsters could use the terrain for their advantage, if the level designer put "hint" entities at corners, doorways, bunkers, around obstacles and such. For example, the marines do take cover behind obstacles and try to draw the player into a crossfire.
The most "intelligent" monsters of Half-Life are the female black ops with stealth gear. They did require a lot of hint entities to fight effectively, but could lure the player into an ambush by using one of them as bait while the others circled around the player.
Re:Playing experience (Score:3, Interesting)
In so many games you can attack an enemy, go hide in a spot the enemy can't get to because of other AI limitations (can't crawl, can't climb ladders) and they just go back to patrolling
Where's the advancement? (Score:3, Insightful)
One would think that games' AI would be improved as more and more CPU power is made available to developers, but instead it seems stagnant. Of course, this is almost certainly due to the fact that while some features (especially graphics) are easy to display on retail packaging, it's hard to evaluate the strength of a game's AI without actually playing for a while. Thus, Marketing pushes aside development of a good AI for shinier graphics, and gamers buy into the myth that graphics are king.
I understand that programming a good enemy AI is difficult, and I don't expect to have every enemy equipped with a full neural net in order to learn my tactics. Still, is it too much to ask for enemies to attempt to flank my last known position when I duck behind cover? To me, a good enemy AI is what can make all the difference between a mediocre game and a truely memorable one. While other considerations - graphics, physics, gameplay, level design and stability - are important, it seems that game AI always gets left by the wayside in order to make things shinier and provide nice box shots.
Re:Where's the advancement? (Score:5, Insightful)
If in this state with these conditions move to state Q
otherwise move to state R
So, half-life and deux-ex II both use the same basic FSMs and decision trees, and "advancement" doesn't come simply from increasing CPU power or more RAM (those things obviously help though) but also the programmers/designers ability to conceive of possible scenarios that could occur. So, if you want an enemy to flank you and kill you then someone has to think ahead of time "Well gee, what state would this bot need to be in before he would go ahead and try to find a way to get behind the player to flank him?" Then, the programmer has to find a way to get the bot to flank you (i.e. find a path to get behind you without you seeing) and then kill you. That's not exactly a trivial task, especially with so many possible scenarios involved.
Re:Where's the advancement? (Score:2, Interesting)
FSMs will still probably have a part to play irrigardless, even if it's to choose what's the best method to think in a certain condition, but otherwise, game AI cannot really improve by mu
Re:Where's the advancement? (Score:4, Interesting)
This encouraged other NPC's to find alternate routes to the player, if available, without having to put in a bunch of hints and such. They'd just "naturally" try to flank the player if they could.
Sorry, can't remember the name of the book. "AI Game Programming" was in the title, though.
Re:Where's the advancement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually there are a number of games that try to improve AI. The reason why you don't see it too often is because there are too many concerns about making it too "smart".
Take for example RTS games. We all know computers "cheat" in those games with their ability to outsmart/outmove/outmicromanage even the greatest players. Make the AI too good and players get floored by them. Make them too easy and players complain about lack of necessary st
Re:Where's the advancement? (Score:1)
Speaking of game AI... (Score:5, Informative)
Memetic AI for Neverwinter Nights [memeticai.org]. This stuff is pretty innovative, at least in theory, and I hope they eventually get to the 1.0 phase with more than just the groundwork done. The approach it takes might be an interesting, even intuitive, way for building the NPC/creature behavior from ground up.
basic pathfinding is not AI (Score:2, Insightful)
How NPCs use the possible paths is where game AI applies. The article mentions steering, which is in the ballpark here.
The reason graphics can continually improve, while AI is very iffy, is that we know what it is game graphics should be approximating. There is no similar target for AI, as there is very little knowledge of how intelligence actually works.
Doh. It's obvious actually. (Score:4, Interesting)
But would it make your game sell better? I bet most gamers won't like that when the harsh reality of a uber bot keeps grinding their noses into the dust.
Given enough effort a very good programmer can easily make a very good bot that beats everyone in Quake 3 or something similar. In many modern games (e.g. FPS shooters) most gamers will NOT win against a well designed bot. A great quake bot can camp near perfectly, know exactly where you will respawn, monopolize items extremely well e.g. it'll always know when the megahealth is going to respawn if it took it, and if the opponent took it, it can still make a very very good guess too - based on it's estimates of opponent health/armour and damage so far). It'll have perfect hearing - based on sound loudness and direction, and it'll have near perfect aim (the accuracy limit depends on ping). If such a bot has a railgun and you somehow sneak up on it undetected, shoot and don't kill it, you'd most likely get shot in the next frame. You're unlikely to kill it with the first shot, coz it would be hogging the mega and armour - but since you always get killed in one shot, you never get to hog the mega or armour and so you always get killed in one rail shot. Your only hope is a map where it can't hog both, but then it means you can't hog both either, which means you just lose less badly, or a map where aim doesn't count at all (doh).
You can talk about Go, chess and all that, but most popular computer games don't require much brains, coz most gamers don't want to use their brains that much, or don't have much brains in the first place.
In short: most popular computer games aren't really brain games, so AIs aren't at a big disadvantage.
Thus it won't surprise me that someone with brains can construct an AI to beat them in games designed for such people.
But what's the point? If you really wanted to play an AI with semi-decent tactics just play against one of those cheaters with an aimbot. Some of the better cheaters might have slightly better tactics and intelligence than the average AI bot (most cheaters aren't that smart tho in human terms). If you're a good enough player with a good enough connection (low latency) you can usually beat em, and then they whine about as imaginatively as a bot.
Re:Doh. It's obvious actually. (Score:1)
Article does not reflect current gaming trends. (Score:3, Interesting)
1) The author neglects the fact that multiplayer gaming capabilities in games have reduced the need for developers to include well-designed single-player AI. For example, in the game Battlefield 1942 most people will play multiplayer over single-player since the single-player bots don't have enough AI to work in teams or operate vehicles effectively.
Since a majority of the people won't play singleplayer, there is no incentive for the developer to improve the single-player AI.
2) Lack of thorough analysis of AI techniques used in recent games. He covers some techniques from academia, but he should have interviewed more developers and which AI techniques they employed, and the trade-offs involved.
3) A few errors in the article, like referring to a Counterstrike Bot as being from Microsoft.
Later this month Valve will be rolling out an official CounterStrike bot in their "new" game CS:Condition Zero (which has a controversial development history). Any CS bots before this one were developed in the mod community.
I'm sure the author could have interviewed the Condition Zero programmers and ask them what AI techniques they had to utilize for this new bot.
A key point I do agree with is that there is not a common AI standard that game companies are using, compared to the video and audio standards.
No matter how fast the CPUs become, gaming AI will not improve in general until developers can easily generate core AI behavior with little effort.
game with good ai (Score:2, Interesting)
Types of AI (Score:5, Interesting)
There's strategy games. Just because it's a game with very little chance (i.e chess) doesn't mean that writing the AI is easy. Though the Civ3 AI is really good, I don't consider it by any means infallible. Perhaps the best example for AI in strategy is Magic: The Gathering. Years ago, they came out with a PC version with AI. The problem was that the AI could never understand the strategies behind different deck and thus couldn't play them effectively. I think designing a good MTG AI would be much tougher than a good GO AI.
There's also reaction-based games (FPS, 3rd person, etc). In this case, the goal is not for the AI to be better than the player, but to emulate the behavior of a human player. UT had much better AI than Quake, simply because the bots weren't omniscient.
Lastly, there's RTS AI, which is a mixture between the two mentioned above. Like the MTG problem, RTS AI generally uses the same generic strategy regardless of opponent, but has lightning reflexes.
Depending on the game genre, different approaches to AI are necessary. In strategy games, simply winning is a good objective. In reactionary games, since computer reaction time is better than human reaction time, creating a good AI player is almost trivial, but creating a realistic and fun opponent is a challenge.
Re:Types of AI (Score:1)
Re:Types of AI (Score:1)
CPU utilization (Score:3, Interesting)
Morrowind was a great game, but it wouldn't work as a MMORPG. However, with adanced AI it would be like entering the world of Mournhold.
As far as current games pushing AI forward; it seems like Fable from Molyneaux is the leader (we hope).
The problem with advanced AI... (Score:1)