I noticed this GamePro blurb about the upcoming sequel to F.E.A.R. Here's an excerpt...
"The most obvious difference that will hit the player right away is in the visual density of the world," said Mulkey. "F.E.A.R. looked really great, but where F.E.A.R. would have a dozen props in a room to convey the space, Project Origin will have five times that much detail.
"Of course, this will only serve to further ratchet up that 'chaos of combat' to all new levels with more breakables, more debris, more stuff to fly through the air in destructive slow motion beauty."
OK... I can dig that. One thing I noticed as I played through F.E.A.R. is that things were kinda sparse. (I really got tired of seeing the same potted cactus, too.)
The part that I am curious about, however is this:
... Mulkey says improved enemy behavior is at the top of the list.
"We are teaching the enemies more about the environment and new ways to leverage it, adding new enemy types with new combat tactics, ramping up the tactical impact of our weapons, introducing more open environments, and giving the player the ability to create cover in the environment the way the enemies do," he says.
Now that is the cool part. When the enemies in the original moved the couches, tables, bookshelves, etc. it was cool... but rather infrequent. I was always expecting them to do more with it. If they are both adding objects to the environment and then "teaching" the agents to actually use those objects, we may see a level of environment interactivity that we've never experienced before.
The cool thing about their planning AI structure is that there isn't a completely rediculous ramp-up in the complexity of the design. All one needs do is tag an object that it can be used in a certain way and it gets included into the mix. On the other hand, having more objects to use and hide behind does increase the potential decision space quite a bit. It's like how the decision tree in chess is far greater than that of Tic-tac-toe because there are so many more options. The good news is that the emergent behavior level will go through the roof. The bad news is that it will hit your processor pretty hard. Expect the game to be a beast to run on a PC.
I certainly am looking forward to mucking about with this game!
This comes from an IGDA (International Game Developer's Association) article by Mathew Sakey. He is discussing how dialogue in games tends to be a real drag. The reason it caught my eye is because of the implications (if not outright pleading) that better AI is potentially a solution. Here is an excerpt from the article:
Part of it is that we are still roleplaying with circuit boards, and technology means it's going to be that way for a while. When the day arrives that we're actually roleplaying with the game AI, and not a pre-scripted database of reactions… well, that day we can just do away with other people altogether and it'll be great. But right now – and despite the never-lived-up-to claims of some developers, including a couple mentioned here – game AI advancements seem irritatingly focused not on character and world reaction to player behavior, but on combat skills, so it's going to be a while before The Elder Scrolls MCMLXXV responds in a genuinely dynamic way to our remarks and activities.
Motion controls, voice recognition and reputation systems are all moving game worlds in a direction where we're not playing, we are participating; where we are not in the game, but of the game. It is the difference between roleplaying with humans and doing so with a circuit board – human conversation dynamically changes based on thousands of subtle cues computers simply cannot track. As the technology and software evolve, we'll naturally see ever-more organic dialogue opportunities in games, provided developers take them.
I believe that this is a fascinating field - but one for which I have no concrete answers. Even setting aside the issue of whether gamers would want to muddle through dialogue (which is also discussed in the article), it is challenging from a strictly technical and academic standpoint. The game Facade tackled this issue (pretty much from a strictly technical and academic standpoint). I saw a GDC presentation on it back in 2004 and have seen it discussed, but I can't claim to have played it. Maybe that should be a stop on my sojourn through this great unknown landscape that is the future of game AI.
Just in time for the Super Bowl, here's an interesting analysis on AIGameDev. It covers some of the very unique challenges that are endemic to the AI of football and even sports games in general.
One very interesting link from that article is a pdf file walking through the evolution of the AI in the Madden series since it started in (get this) 1986. That does point to an advantage that the Madden franchise has in its development... they get to iterate every single year. That means they can build upon their past code, get feedback from a massive user base, and tweak to their hearts content. I very much recommend reading through the document.
This is my tentative schedule for GDC. I'm kind of annoyed that many of my sessions overlap. I suppose that's one of the main reasons why I bring Laurie so she can go to the business and legal ones. However, I hate having to choose between the ones on AI and agile development, for example. Heck... I haven't even checked on the keynotes like the one from Ray Kurzweil. Usually those don't conflict with other things too much, though.
Obviously, you can click on the links to learn more about the sessions and/or the people.
My week will also include:
Tuesday night:IGDA party Wednesday night: Booth crawl & Game Developers Choice Awards Thursday night: Author's party for my publisher (see sidebar for link to AI Wisdom 4) Friday night: AI Programmers Dinner and possibly Video Games Live
Ok... this isn't AI-related - but it sure is damn cool! Johnny Lee from Carnegie Mellon University has managed to use the Wii remote and sensor bar to create the illusion of 3D and head tracking by hooking them up to a PC. The effect is startling!
I agree with his final statement, "I wanna see some games!"
I happened upon this blog entry by a reviewer of the new Far Cry 2 by Ubisoft (note, not Crytek). I include this paragraph here but please visit the blog for more information.
Ubisoft also makes some very grandiose claims about Far Cry 2's AI, which makes me far more leery than any promises of beautiful graphics or realistic physics. Every game I've seen that promises realistic artificial intelligence has fallen short. It's not about bad AI, but more about developers making promises they can't back up. According to Ubisoft, Far Cry 2 will sport complex, nonscripted artificial intelligence that has enemies and NPCs reacting to personal needs. I've heard that enemy soldiers will seek shade when it's hot, take breaks then they're tired, and seek out food when they're hungry. Combine these claims with a sprawling world and I find myself having flashbacks of the buildup to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bethesda Softworks promised some amazingly realistic behavior in its NPCs, but it didn't quite make it. The game was still very good and its characters occasionally showed glimpses of intelligence, but it didn't live up to the hype. I saw an enemy medic pick up a wounded soldier to carry him to safety in Far Cry 2 and was impressed by the action, but until I play the final game myself and see that sort of behavior manifest consistently, I'll take the promises of AI with a generous spoonful of salt.
I seriously agree with the skepticism. One thing that Far Cry 2 has going for its AI is that Crytek is not doing it. Far Cry had gaping holes in it and Crysis continues that trend (see my observations on Crysis at Post-Play'em.). That being said, I would seriously like to see the claims come true, of course. Anything that advances the technology of autonomous agent-based AI is cool with me.
Another gem from over at what is rapidly becoming our sister-site, AIGameDev.com - this is the result of a discussion that started a few weeks amongst the site regulars.
Of the top 5, I'm the most excited about an increase in sandbox games and emergent behaviors. Really, I see these two as almost interlinked. Sandbox games not only allow emergent behavior to proliferate - they almost require it to do so in order to keep immersion.
Likewise, interagent cooperation was another of the top 5 on the list. Again, this is something that I see as related to emergent behavior. If you leave your cooperation loosely defined rather than pre-scripted, you will see a lot of emergent behavior as a result.
I hope to get more a feel about this very topic at the GDC roundtables and lectures next month. That is always a great way to take the pulse of the industry. Anyway, good stuff on the list.
Gamasutra recently posted an interview with David Braben (notably a co-writer of "Elite" from the 80s as well as other games). In it, he discusses his upcoming game "The Outsider" where they are working on expanding the concept of dynamic story generation beyond the "branching storyline" feel of many of today's games.
A selection from page 1 of 4 of the interview:
Most of [the companies that have moved gameplay forward] are quite subtle. We've certainly seen things like Oblivion where you've got all the side quests that make the world feel a lot better.
The Darkness touched on that a little bit as well, and quite a few games have elements of what you might call 'side gameplay' that help feed into the richness, but they don't fundamentally alter the story: games like Deus Ex where you had branching story, and there was some slight branching in games like Indigo Prophecy. So, I think all of those things are positive, but a lot of them felt, to me, like they hadn't done the trick.
The problem is, I felt they didn't quite deliver on their promise. Their promise is not actually the fact that you can play it through and have a different story, because that sounds fundamentally irrelevant -- you play a game through and think, "So what, I could have done things slightly differently". That's not the point. I find that once you try playing games in a slightly contrary way, you end up finding a lot of blind alleys, things that you just can't do, which I think is tragic. If you offer that promise, you've got to deliver on it.
So it's not so much the fact of the story being able to go lots of different ways. It's the fact that you can try a lot of different things and you'll find a way through. It may not be what you anticipated, but there is a way through. I think it's that sort of thing -- being able to experiment with the world in a fun way.
I would agree that there are a lot of things that could be done to move away from the linearity of gameplay in games. Certain titles that offer sidequests give the appearance of this as Braben mentions.
I played through most of Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 - and did my utmost to complete all the side-quests. But I was well aware of the fact that a designer had dropped these quests into the game all over. They were smaller carrots than the main theme of the game, but they were dangling veggies nonetheless. I was also well aware of when I had completed all of them and had to get back about the business of the main plotline. Sure, I could wander about the cities and wilderness aimlessly like I was out for a stroll, but no one would have anything to do with me unless there was a quest attached to them. So what was the point? At that stage, I was merely procrastinating with what I was "supposed to be doing" as concevied and presented by the design team.
I think that about the closest we have to open game play these days is RTS and TBS games. Civ 4 is my latest obsessionresearch project. All it does is give me the rules of the world and a variety of potential end goals (note: not just ONE end goal). After that, it turns me loose to do whatever I want. There is no string I have to follow through the maze.
The Sims, Sim City, and other "god games" are similar. "Here's your sandbox - go make something." But how does this get mapped succesfully over to the RPG - or even FPS genre? Heck, it took years for the MMO world to get over the chorus of "but what am I supposed to do? What's the story?" The meek answer from the industry was "uh... make your own story...?"
Part of the process will have to be making gamers comfortable with the concept. There are many people who want to be told exactly what to do next. They don't want to think - they want to act. Until that mentality is softened up a bit, any game that lacks that linear component runs the risk of being critically panned by the media and gamers alike.
It looks like Braben addresses this somewhat in "The Outsider".
The actual problem is, when you start making a story very flexible, you're putting your hand in a mincing machine from a design point of view.
But also, you have to cater for a lot of different types of play style. There are still the sort of people who want a brain-off experience, and I think that's a good thing -- I don't think that's a criticism. You don't want to have to think, "Oh, what am I supposed to do now," because that's the flipside of this, the unspoken problem.
[Objectives] should still be really obvious, but there's something nice about when you go through doing what you're told, and you think, "Wait a second, this isn't quite right!" And it's that same element with Outsider where you've got corruption, that it's really quite interesting. Now, you can play through the [straightforward] route, and you end up with quite an interesting ending, but you can also break off at any second, and start questioning why things are happening the way they're happening.
So really I like where he says he's going with the game. It will be interesting to see how the implementation plays out (so to speak).
CMP’s 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in game development acknowledging excellence in game creation, will honor computer strategy game luminary Sid Meier with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s ceremony taking place at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of developers such as Meier who have made an indelible impact on the craft of game development, as he has with the creation of a number of genre-defining titles including Civilization and Pirates!
I am currently beating my head against the wall that is Civ 4 at the moment, and got many years of pleasure out of the original Civilization and especially Civ 2. I also remember vividly playing F-15 Strike Eagle in the mid-80s and later F-19 Stealth Fighter. Because of what he has meant in my gaming history, I will be honored to be able to be present for this ceremony. Sid Meier truly is one of the great game designers in the industry and I personally salute him and thank him for his contributions.
I hate glomming on to a blog chain, but I'm going to link to AIGameDev's article on an article (which may very well be about an article.) The title is Watching Level Designers Use Scripts to Disable Your Autonomous AI: Priceless - which just about covers it. Alex does a nice job of not just reporting on it, but explaining the mindset and even the things to watch out for.
Regular readers of my other blog, Post-Play'em will know that I talked about the idea of scripts over-riding AI behaviors in Call of Duty 2 in a post entitled Call of Duty 2: Omniscience and Invulnerability. Specifically, this was in reference to one of the behaviors mentioned in the other article where an AI agent takes on a temporary god-like quality of invulnerability until such time as he finishes a scripted event - at which time he is no longer important to the level designer's wishes and is cast back into the pot of cannon fodder so that I can mow him down properly.
Getting back to the initial topic, my thought is that part of the issue between artists/level designers and programmers may very well be that the level designers don't have a trust in the capabilities of autonomous AI agents... or even and understanding of what could be done with them.
For example, with the use of goal-based agents such as those found in F.E.A.R. (related post), rather than a designer saying "I want the bot to do A then B, then C on his way to doing the final action of D." he could simply tell the goal-based agent that "D is a damn good goal to accomplish." If constructed properly, the agent would then realize that a perfectly viable way of accomplishing D would be via A-B-C-D. The difference between these two methods is important. If C is no longer a viable (or intelligent looking) option, then the scripted bot either gets stuck or looks very dumb in still trying to accomplish D through that pre-defined path. The very nature of planning agents, however, would allow the agent to try to find other ways of satisfying D. If one exists, he will find it. If not, perhaps another goal will suffice.
The problem is, while AI programmers understand this concept (especially if you are the one who wrote the planner for that game), level designers and particularly artists, may not have an intuitive grasp on this. They are cut more from the cloth of writers - "and then this happened, and then this, and then it was really cool when I wrote this next thing because I wanted the agent to look smart, and then this..." That is being a writer - and is why many games continue to be largely linear in nature. You are being pulled through an experience on a string of scripted events. (See related post on Doom 3's scripting vs. AI)
So, can the problem of designers trumping AI programmers be solved? It will always be there to some extent. But education and communication will certainly help the matter.
Wow... and I was complaining about the lack of AI sessions at the upcoming Game Developers Conference. It was just announced that Ray Kurzweil, inventor and AI luminary, will be presenting a keynote speech at the GDC in February. I plan on catching that session!
Among other things, he runs the website KurzweilAI.net which just has a rediculous amount of news about all facets of AI, technology, and even some psychology. I would very much recommend people check out the site.
Gamasutra
