You don’t want a neural net for your game AI because it’s behavior is unpredictable and therefore cannot be tested.
All of the issues AI companies have now times by a thousand because now the AI have access to a physical presence in the game world. It would cheat and find ways to know things about the game state that it’s not supposed to know, or it would hide in a corner as far away from the player as possible because it’s parameters is to avoid death, or some other unforeseen function of its instructions.
This entirely depends on the quality of the AI and the task at hand. A well made AI can be relatively predictable. However, most tasks that AI excels at are tasks which themselves do not have a predictable solution. For instance, handwriting recognition can be solved by a neural network with much better than human accuracy. That task does not have a perfect solution, and there is not an ideal answer for each possible input (one person’s ‘a’ could look exactly the same as another’s ‘o’). The same can be said for almost all games, especially those involving a human player.
and therefore cannot be tested
Unpredictable things can be tested. That’s pretty much what the entire field of statistics and probability is about. Also, testability is a fundamental requirement for any kind of machine learning. It isn’t just a good practice kind of thing; if you can’t test your model, you don’t even have a model in the first place. The whole point is to create many candidate models and test them to find the best one.
It would cheat and find ways to know things about the game state that it’s not supposed to know
A neural network only knows what you tell it. If you don’t tell it where the player is, it’s not going to magically deduce it from nothing. Also, it’s output has to be interpreted to even be used. The raw output is a vector of numbers. How this is transformed into usable actions is entirely up to the developer. If that transformation allows violating the rules, that’s the developers fault, not the networks. The same can be said of human input; it is the developers responsibility to transform that into permissable actions in game.
it would hide in a corner as far away from the player as possible because it’s parameters is to avoid death
That is possible. Which is why you should make a performance metric that reflects what you actually want it to try to do. This is a very common issue and is just part of the process of making an AI. It is not an insurmountable problem.
Neural networks have been used to play countless games before. It’s probably one of the most studied use cases simply because it is so easy to do.
Im pretty sure we could make AI in games smarter and/or better than humans for a long time. They are just not fun to play against. You need to have AI that you can win against. What i think should be happening instead of neural networks is the ai should gamble a bit more . The good example is eu4 where on hard difficulty ai will not attack you until its sure it can win… which makes it more predictable than normal ai beacuse you can reasonably guess whetewer it will attack you and try to outmanouver it. Wheras on normal sometimes it will just attack you if there is a reasonable ( or sometimes even unreasonable ) chance to win which makes normal sometimes( very very very very rarely ) harder difficulty. Now hard difficulty is stil generaly ( 99,9% of time ) much harder due to ai cheats but what i said is a thing. Total war Warhammer 3 could use that in particular to spice things up. Currently attacking army will always attack and defending will defend which makes attacking more advantagous , and the army will always wait for reinforcment . They could for example make it so depending on the army composition ( or even just rng ) the defending army will sometimes attack ( for example when there are only melee combatants ) so that you dont have time to deal damage with mage . Or the opposite. Make it so the attacking army will just stay still and protect the artilery and bombard you with canons it it has lots of artilery . Like you know just some basic strategies so the fights arent always so similar at the begining.
Yeah, the easiest thing to implement is omnipotent AI. The code for the AI is executed within the game engine, so you have complete access to any information you want.
You can just query the player position at any point in time, even if there’s a wall between the NPC and the player. It requires extra logic to not use the player position in such a case, or to only use the rough player position after the player made a noise, for example.
Of course, the decision-making is a whole separate story. Even an omnipotent AI won’t know how to use this information, unless you provide it with rules.
I’m guessing, what OP wants is:
limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
I just bought this after playing satisfactory and I love the optimism in this game.
I’m so into it. Sure you can tell it’s made by a small team but I couldn’t tell it was made by 2 people. I don’t like playing with mods but this one worked well with them to get rid of a bit of storage monotony.
Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.
trying to live train AI against your playstyle is both expensive and unnecessary. Hard bots have never really been too much trouble. We don’t really need to use AI to outpace humans in most games. The exceptions would be an extremely long play games like chess and go.
There’s been a lot of use in AI for platformers and stuff like trackmania, but not for competition, simply for speedruns.
It would certainly be nice to have for the fighting games I play. A few have toyed with the idea of “shadow fighters”, but it never really feels like playing against a person. It might get their habits down, but it doesn’t replicate the adaptation of facing a person and having them change how they play based on how you’re playing. If someone could crack that nut, everyone would have someone on their level to play against at any hour of the day, no matter how obscure the game is.
yeah I would like to leverage AI for stuff like RPG NPCs. instead of hearing the same filler lines for 200 hours of gameplay, barely reacting to the context of your game you could have a vibrant array of endless dialog that actually keeps up with your game progress (or lack thereof).
That would be a pretty good use. Llms are a little slow on most home hardware still. Hallucinations could also be a little scary. I wonder if that would affect your ESRB rating, That’s technically it could say anything…
The fear of hallucinations is so great for a commercial company that when square enix tried it on a remake of a detective game of theirs, it became the poster child of how awful LLMs are for videogames, it’s one of the worst rated steam games, it’s like talking to a wall because they nerfed it so hard it’s worse than a normal text parser.
Hard bots have actually been so much trouble, that literally the only way to make them hard at all is to make them cheat by allowing them to operate outside of the ruleset the player is bound by. It’s a humongous issue with every strategy game on the market.
I finished Silent Hill 2 too, the Mannequins made me jump so many times. They always seemed to appear when I least expected them to. The game created such a tense and scary atmosphere the whole way through but the prison area was by far the spookiest and of course I didn’t understand the hanging part and kept getting punished for it lol.
I also played The Last of Us Part 1 it was no where near as scary but the story was so good, I even cried a bit. I’d love more games that focused on keeping quiet, I dont think I’ve played anything with that sort of mechanic before. I really hope they port part 2 to pc soon.
I tried to play Alien Isolation but I kept getting game breaking bugs and when I finally managed to get about an hour in, there were still no aliens?? Just more bugs so I’ve given up on it and maybe I’ll try see if there are any fixes and stuff when I have more time since so many people recommend it.
Ah damn, its an issue on console too, that sucks. I wonder why there are so many recommendations when its so broken. I can’t believe its on gamepass and PS5 when it can so easily be broken in less than 5 minutes
Somehow replied to my own comment. Good thing I am actively drinking coffee. Yeah, although it makes me wonder if the game pass version isn’t basically the console version. They do some weird stuff with required windows processes.
The most advanced AI I’ve seen is in Hitman WoA, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Both games don’t have “learning” AI. They just have tons of rules that the player can reasonably expect and interact with, that make them seem lifelike. If a guard sees you throw a coin twice in Hitman, he doesn’t get suspicious and investigate - he goes and picks it up just like the first one. Same for reactions to finding guns, briefcases, or your exploding rubber duck.
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