🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 13 Nov 2016 02:48:49 -0000, "Trimble Bracegirdle"
<no-spam@never.spam> wrote:

>I'm certainly interested in Dishonored 2 .
>The PC version is reported to have lots of seriously bad Bugs 
>& poor optimization.
>'They' promise a patch in a few days.
>
>Thing I want to know is how is the A.I ?
>This is what spoils the 1st game for me.
>e.g:
>carefully stealthing around a square to avoid detection.
>succeeding in getting to a side road to abruptly find 
>2 guards have appeared out of thin air behind me.
>then another in front in a closed in area with no way he could have got in.
>
>e.g:
>Creeping along the upper shelves of a basement dog kennel 
>where a guard walks round talking lovingly to the dogs.
>I silently kill a dog immediately along side him.
>Guard just keeps on walking & talking .
>Kill more dogs there . Guard  just does not respond.
>(\__/)
>(='.'=)
>(")_(")  mouse (Ghosts in Pac Man Were Better)

Well, I have to say I never thought too deeply about this before but I
think you just got to the heart of what bugs me about many of these
stealth games.  Detection by the enemy always seems to be based on
something that's too easily quantifiable like a visibility radius.
Visual and auditory components should both play important roles in
this sort of thing, and that sort of "AI" should not really be that
difficult.  

I put AI in quotes because I think the term AI implies a software's
ability to learn from its environment and improve itself as a factor
of the experiences the user puts it through.  I realize that's not
what most gamers mean by AI.

Factors like an enemy detecting the player based on particular
conditions, and making sure those conditions model reality (or at
least the setting the game is placed) are relatively simple game
design in my opinion, and there's little excuse for fucking them up.

Yes, the ghosts in PacMan were a brilliant example of what gamers call
AI and what I call "character" (i.e behavioral traits that are unique
to a specific instance of a non-player character).  Part of their
brilliance though was in the simplicity of the game design itself.
When behavioral choices are limited to left/right/up/down, speed up
speed down pause and reverse, and you only have four NPCs, it is much
easier to design procedural character into the game.  Or, AI as it
were to some.

Another great example (better I think than PacMan) was the old Dynamix
game Red Baron.  Now granted the game design itself kind of supported
the ease of adding procedural character, but the physics of biplanes
made for a somewhat more interesting platform for this sort of thing
than ghosts in a maze, IMO.   You could fly against individual pilots
who all had "personality" in the way they flew in addition to the
characteristics of the actual planes.  It was a very simple game by
today's standards and required the player to use their imagination a
bit, but if you played enough you could tell the designers did a nice
job of assigning unique flying traits (character) to the computer
controlled pilots.  

I couldn't truly consider it AI until they implemented a feature that
allowed the pilots to figure out what their human opponent was good
at, and start to exploit it and work around it, but it was a really
good example of what most people mean when they talk about player AI
today.