alanschu

Bleeding heart liberal fascist nonsense? All of those adjectives do not apply to Taks, and I've bumped heads with him on a few occasions. And I live in Alberta, Canada, and my income level has me pay $44/month for Alberta Health Care. Not an unreasonable price, and whenever I go for a checkup I don't pay at the door or anything, but it's certainly not free. This ignores that many poorer people get their health care premiums fully and partially subsidized. Though to be honest, I don't mind our health care system, and think the critics that whine about it like to take extreme examples themselves to prove their points. Anyways, carry on. See you all next month!

What? It has SPECIAL? I was assured that this game would not have SPECIAL. I want my money back.

I'm certainly no expert in artificial intelligence, and I certainly don't know who makes the "best" AI (best by what metric?), nor am I all that familiar with Unreal's AI (though I do remember thinking that the AI in the original Unreal was, well, unreal at the time), but I will offer my thoughts none-the-less. To be perfectly frank, I can't think of anything substantial in modern AI, in terms of anything revolutionary. Unfortunately, it does not really seem to be the focus in game development at this time. It doesn't take much time to recognize that much of the focus is on the more instant and immediate visuals. By visuals I mean both graphics (as has been the case for the past 10 years), as well as (more recently) physics. It is something that is very easy to promote, as videos and screenshots provide a sufficient medium. As a result, AI has slowly taken a back seat, especially if you look at it in terms of percentage of computational power used. In my limited experience, much of the AI focus in video games is done on things such as pathfinding. I suspect this is both because pathfinding errors tend to be immersion killers (not necessarily bad pathfinding, but certainly broken pathfinding), and it's also an aspect of AI that has had a fair bit of investment, so algorithms are more readily available, and research more thorough. Things such as decision trees for multiple agents inside a 3D space become problematic, especially as games become more complex. I would say that this is mostly due to the size of the search space and its subsequent branching factor. You can easily set up a simple decision tree for determining whether or not a bad guy decides to fight or run away, based on perhaps a metric of health remaining. That's just two options however. When you want them to make their decisions based upon the current situation, which could involve additional enemies, additional allies, and so on. Suddenly, with just the two options of fighting and running away, a more sophisticated AI is going to have to take into account the dynamic parameters of the situation. For instance, an agent could get hit to a point where he has low enough hit points that typically he would want to run away, except that this agent also has 3 friends helping him fight, and his foe is particularly tough and requires a heavy concentration of fire, and it's unlikely that the foe has enough firepower to actually kill the agent. When you start to add to the list of actions so you have more than just fight/run away (should I flank? Should I hide? Should I cover? Should I find healing? Should I rush?), a non-trivial AI will start to eat up an exponential amount of computer cycles. Then you start to take into consideration that it must analyze the environment. It should recognize that doors are choke points and to not go running through them if it knows the enemy is on the other side. So now it needs to address what exactly is a door? You can fake it by implementing some sort of key into the level that will recognize that certain areas are doors, but that's not necessarily perfect, and if you miss one, then it simply will not be treated like a door. So do you spend time teaching it to not go through doors through some reinforcement learning? That could work, but perhaps it finds large garage doors to be the same as small one person doors. It's a lot of work, which means it's a lot of time and money. AI can also be curtailed because a very good AI is not a very fun AI. My boss (Jonathan Schaeffer) has made basically an unbeatable Checkers AI (go ahead and try to beat it here if you want). He has shown that with the first move, it cannot lose unless you handicap it. A smart and dynamic AI can also lead to unexpected consequences. Sometimes this is good (the gunboats in Half-Life 2 ended up assessing that the rockets from the RPG were a bigger threat than the person, and would try to shoot the rocket when you shot one). Other times this can be bad (implementations of the radiant AI in Oblivion that lead to NPCs killing each other, leaving quests unattainable and so on. As cool as this may sound, the fact of the matter is that on the whole, people want to be the one taking part in the action). There is also uncertainties. My University worked together with EA on making a dynamic AI that learned as it played for FIFA 2004. It was very effective, but EA would not ship it with any copy of the game, because it was impossible to guarantee that the AI would never break. The fact that the AI changed and adapted meant it was possible for the AI to for whatever reason get bad input, and break itself. I had a brief discussion with Dr. Schaeffer about the future of AI, and in his opinion, the prognosis was not too optimistic. In his view, things probably wouldn't significantly change until addon cards designed specifically for artificial intelligence became common, since it would be processor power that would be reserved exclusively for the artificial intelligence. Right now it is much more economically and computationally efficient to work on squeezing out better graphics/physics with the available cycles, rather than exploring into the more uncertain world of artificial intelligence. I know research has been done to help reduce the computation time of things such as pathfinding. Abstractions and heuristics are created to greatly reduce the amount of search space (though this is true for all parts of AI, not just pathfinding). In my opinion, there is no technical reason why a game cannot have good pathfinding (just those annoying time and money reasons). I do think that AI has improved in recent years, just not at the same pace as graphics and physics. Perhaps as we approach the uncanny valley, we'll see diminishing returns on continued investment into graphics and physics, and more time and energy will be spent on improving artificial intelligence applications in video games. Unfortunately, simplistic AI tends to be sufficient for a lot of people. The problem is compounded when people don't really want "good" AI, they want "realistic" AI. So what are the metrics for "realistic" AIs? I know this doesn't really answer your question, but that's just my thoughts. Based on what little I have read about the Unreal AI, it seems as though it provides a nice framework for you to implement your own AI. It probably has decent pathfinding algorithms and whatnot, but a licensee is still going to need to set up how the AI should react in situations and determine metrics for its decision making models. Having awesome pathfinding doesn't mean much if the agents aren't sure what it should pathfind to! It doesn't make sense for a squad of troops to stick together unless it knows that there are useful bonuses for sticking together. Stuff like that. Having said that, Epic seems to be in the engine business, almost more so than the game business. Their games seem to be more demonstrations of what they can do with their engine (which means it's still in their best interests to make good games, since it makes the engine more appealing). I have heard that the Unreal 3 Engine is super nice to work with, and I imagine that a lot of the hard work for the foundation of AI is probably done quite well, since Epic has a financial interest in it. Anyways, hopefully you found my thoughts interesting. I will now return to my self-imposed hiatus. Allan

Give me a moment.

My crappy crap crap credit card has 100% fraud protection that comes with the card, which I just confirmed would in fact protect me from this.

Is Grant Ledyard some nickname for Andy Moog?

O.o

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Your understanding of economics is hi-freaking-larious. Anyways, carry on everyone.

I suspect my life would be relatively unaffected. Given I've already grown disenfranchised with the forum, I'd probably only notice when reading about Obsidian going under. Though undoubtedly I'd bump into the odd familiar alias at times, for better or worse.

Acquiring those other players was expensive.

Okay Volo. You're a liar. Using your now established background of being a liar, a logical conclusion is that you're lying about your experiences simply to try to prove a point. Cheers!

Weren't you the guy that used to call out people as liars for exaggerating?

I'll go out on a limb and state that the hype machine of DNF will start sometime in 2008.

"This threat" = "This thread.

He is out protecting us from ManBearPig!

I can't say the name, lest I break the rule, but it has a net and we bump, set, and spike the ball to the side we are not on. We are not that good, but it is still a lot of fun. You can find me with a ball and net, with a bounce and a drive through the key on some days as well. Count me in for a game with sticks and a small orange ball, where we put it in the six by four net as well.

My day has been great. I had some bugs to squish at work, but in the end got quite a lot done. Which is good, as I will have to show off my work some time in the next day. Got it done just in time Then I will play some sports with some friends.

All that you need to do is just talk. With time, most will make a slip or two and that will be that. How was your day Blank?

I will see you on the next day. Sleep well.

I really enjoyed C++, but my experience with it is still pretty limited. The overwhelming bulk of my programming experience has been with Java, which I find to be simply okay.

If you feel you know how to play the game, and think you can play it well, then lets see if you can make me break the rule, and I shall do the same for you. Does that sound fair? It is all just for fun of course! Would you like to start, or would you like me to start?

It was a spin of the quote that Chuck tossed you in that great, old game with The Black Gate. Steve will know!

You think so? Prove it!

Because he is looking to eat into his profit margins and spend money. A philantropist really.