
The Total Beginner's Guide to Game AI - stesch
https://www.gamedev.net/articles/programming/artificial-intelligence/the-total-beginners-guide-to-game-ai-r4942/
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xedarius
I worked as an AI engineer on a few Playstation titles, by far the most
important part of AI is messaging whats happening to the player. Usually a
well scripted animation or voice cue will beat and cleverly written reasoning
engine.

We always had loads of cool ideas, like enemies running out of ammo and
throwing clips to each other. But the reality is, the player will never see
it.

Uncharted does a great job of messaging the AI's intent to the player. The AI
itself is fairly decent, but the messaging of intent is excellent.

~~~
Pulcinella
Yeah its kind of funny that AI that plays smart and doesnt announce intentions
to the player can be viewed as bad, dumb, or unfair, but when the AI enemies
basicslly tell the player exactly what they are doing it is viewed as
intelligent.

~~~
lainga
Well, on the contrary, I loved the AI in Halo 2/3, and half the time you'd be
alerted to new developments by the AI on _your_ side (Marines saying "aw f$%$
here comes $unit!").

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otras
Just posted this in another thread, but it’s especially relevant here:

I work at a small AI startup, and our CEO worked on the AI for the NPCs in
F.E.A.R. [0]. He has written about developing the goal-oriented action
planning [1] approach in the game (and is linked to in this article). Great to
see how it was done!

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.E.A.R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.E.A.R).
[1]:
[http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear....](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf)

~~~
madeuptempacct
At the end of the day, FEAR felt very much short of the expectations, just
like the "smart gunships in Half Life that learned to shoot down incoming RPGs
on their own" and the supposedly goal driven AI in STALKER which was never
really implemented.

~~~
lawlessone
>smart gunships in Half Life that learned to shoot down RPGs on their own

I want to know more about this.

was it just preprogrammed ability/method that was unlocked after a time or was
there some sort of machine learning?

~~~
mepian
I suspect that the gunship was simply programmed to shoot the closest hostile
entity, which happened to be the player's rockets. This kind of emergent
behavior is actually quite common in gameplay programming. In any case,
machine learning was not involved in the development of Half-Life.

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lenocinor
I used to teach game AI. Most of the articles I read are badly researched,
incomplete, and full of opinions of the author based on whatever they noticed
trying things randomly in their game.

This article, on the other hand, is comprehensive and very well-written.
Anyone interested in this topic should give it a read.

~~~
danbolt
This might be because games are a young medium, but I find a lot of “primers”
on game design to feel like subjective reflections of the author’s ludography.
The sort of fundamentals a level designer for a 90s first-person shooter would
give seem very different from a 2010’s indie platformer dev or a big-budget
JRPG producer. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of insight that’s indifferent to
genre or team size yet.

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60654
Nice intro! Some of the more advanced techniques (MCTS, GOAP/planning and so
on) get the short shrift, but it's totally expectable for an intro article.

And the early section on constraints is especially great. Game AI has to worry
about enjoyable performance and variety of challenges given almost no CPU
time, which makes all the difference...

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arkitaip
Very cool. I would love it if there was a computer game where you basically
created different AIs for different scenarios that you played out.

~~~
formalsystem
Here's a game you may like then
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/98200/Frozen_Synapse/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/98200/Frozen_Synapse/)

~~~
reificator
The soundtrack is also excellent, I have it in my instrumental playlist for
when I'm working. The only problem is that sometimes it's too good and I want
to pay more attention to it than the work.

[https://nervoustestpilot.co.uk/album/frozen-synapse-
original...](https://nervoustestpilot.co.uk/album/frozen-synapse-original-
soundtrack)

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ArtWomb
Good intro. There is a lot of history covered here. And of course, the art is
in the implementation ;)

Currently, an interesting new (neuro-)evolution is happening in Game AI. With
the OpenAI 5 and it's "180 years of training per day". We begin to see the
feedback loop of game design being influenced by AI.

 _Detroit: Become Human_ is one recent example of how AI is used to manage the
enormous complexity in game narrative. And some hotly anticipated titles for
the fall including _Last of Us 2_ and _Death Stranding_ will demonstrate the
state-of-the-art.

And I don't think it's just for open world environments. Or a new generation
of cloud-enabled VR / AR experiences. AI will also be used to re-design
"flaws" in arcade classics. And render them infinitely playable into the
future.

~~~
gambler
_> Detroit: Become Human is one recent example of how AI is used to manage the
enormous complexity in game narrative._

What does it do? From walkthroughs I've seen, it looks extremely scripted.

~~~
reificator
If there's anything that Detroit: Become Human does well, it's branching
narrative. Does it approach true freedom? Not at all. But compared to, say,
Telltale games or something like Until Dawn, it's pretty impressively open
ended[0].

Now, do I recommend it? Absolutely not. It starts off really good, especially
if you're already expecting another Heavy Rain or Beyond Two Souls. But after
a few hours (maybe just one?) it gets heavier and heavier handed. It's
impressive how quickly it turns from an interesting story about both
intolerance and what it means to be human, and just becomes a series of scenes
that practically scream "DO YOU GET IT YET? DO YOU?".

Probably still the best David Cage game I've seen, mostly for the strong intro
and branching narrative, but that's like picking your favorite Uwe Boll movie.
If you want to play one of these style of games and can handle horror, I'd
point you toward Until Dawn instead, as I think that's probably the best
example of the genre.

[0]: [Spoilers] Here's a graph of the choices available in one mission. Some
are significantly more linear, some are even more complex. Note that other
missions may include two or more (Up to 5 I think?) starting points.
[https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2018/...](https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2018/05/fugitives-82-percent-
flowchart-detroit-become-human.jpg)

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Someguywhatever
I thought HALO had good AI, and there was a writeup somewhere (IDK where) by
Bungie devs about how they implemented complex seeming behaviour with some
relatively simple/dumb rules.

~~~
jamcohen
Is this what you’re looking for?
[https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130663/gdc_2005_proce...](https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130663/gdc_2005_proceeding_handling_.php)

~~~
Someguywhatever
I think so, I haven't read through it but it looks like the one, thanks for
finding it!

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erdosnew
my favorite game of all time is Activision's Battlezone. everything was near
perfection, just wish to see a better AI

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jlebrech
Is it possible to use machine learning to have the AI improve itself?

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grumpopotamus
Yes! This is the domain of Reinforcement Learning:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning)

~~~
jlebrech
I was thinking you could have an AI character play the level and that would
reinforce that character's moveset.

