AI Rant Presentation

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    • AI Rant Presentation

      Watch me speak at GDC!

      The AI Rants from GDC 2012 are now online in the free section of the GDC vault. This is where a bunch of AI programmers get together and complain about something concerning AI. It's the most enjoyable speech I've ever given:
      gdcvault.com/play/1015719/Turing-Tantrums-AI-Developers-Rant

      I'm at around 20:55 and speak for 7 - 8 minutes.

      -Rez
    • I see now what you mean by how fast you are able to teach, once you hit the stand it hit warp speed lol.
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      Laptop - Alienware M17x
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    • The background AI in Skyrim is ok. It's not the best I've seen, but it helps create the illusion of an immersive world. It's certainly better than something like Dragon Age or Mass Effect; at least Bethesda tried.

      NPC's seem to have schedules and follow them reasonably well, though there are certainly times when I see that fail. Still, I've watched NPC's try to fist-fight a dragon. The barks (random phrases NPC's say when you walk by) are repetitive and become uninteresting very quickly. It's also unrealistic. If you don't know me, why are you telling me your life story? NPC's walk through the middle of conversations all the time (a problem I trivially solved on Rat Race 6 years ago). They also play barks while you're conversing, which means that while you're trying to immerse yourself in some story dialog, some guy will say "You know what the problem is with Skyrim? Everyone is obsessed with death." His speech will overpower the speaker. It's even more confusing when they're the same voice actor.

      The combat AI in Skyrim is horrifically bad. Dragon fights are trivially easy, most monsters can be thwarted by having a tree or something you can just dance around, and there is no sense of tactics whatsoever. It's WAY too easy to exploit the combat AI. It's usually better to not have a companion because he/she just gets stuck on terrain or runs in front of your attacks. The pathfinding is a joke in that game. Many of the issues they face are considered solved problems in the AI community but they plague every single Bethesda game.

      Sorry man, but overall, the AI in Skyrim is a joke.

      -Rez
    • I really enjoy the Fallout Games from betheda for the quest's, however it is pretty easy to beat some of the AI's.
      PC - Custom Built
      CPU: 3rd Gen. Intel i7 3770 3.4Ghz
      GPU: ATI Radeon HD 7959 3GB
      RAM: 16GB

      Laptop - Alienware M17x
      CPU: 3rd Gen. Intel i7 - Ivy Bridge
      GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M - 2GB GDDR5
      RAM: 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 @ 1600mhz
    • Originally posted by rezination
      The background AI in Skyrim is ok. It's not the best I've seen, but it helps create the illusion of an immersive world. It's certainly better than something like Dragon Age or Mass Effect; at least Bethesda tried.

      NPC's seem to have schedules and follow them reasonably well, though there are certainly times when I see that fail. Still, I've watched NPC's try to fist-fight a dragon. The barks (random phrases NPC's say when you walk by) are repetitive and become uninteresting very quickly. It's also unrealistic. If you don't know me, why are you telling me your life story? NPC's walk through the middle of conversations all the time (a problem I trivially solved on Rat Race 6 years ago). They also play barks while you're conversing, which means that while you're trying to immerse yourself in some story dialog, some guy will say "You know what the problem is with Skyrim? Everyone is obsessed with death." His speech will overpower the speaker. It's even more confusing when they're the same voice actor.

      The combat AI in Skyrim is horrifically bad. Dragon fights are trivially easy, most monsters can be thwarted by having a tree or something you can just dance around, and there is no sense of tactics whatsoever. It's WAY too easy to exploit the combat AI. It's usually better to not have a companion because he/she just gets stuck on terrain or runs in front of your attacks. The pathfinding is a joke in that game. Many of the issues they face are considered solved problems in the AI community but they plague every single Bethesda game.

      Sorry man, but overall, the AI in Skyrim is a joke.

      -Rez


      I still think it's better then most games. A lot of games I played dealt with those problems by designing the level so only a very certain things can happen. I remember in Crysis 2 the AI seemed very good but it was an illusion, enemies would only fight in a specilised "arena" that work by a set of waypoints and have vary few decisions avilabe. and special enemies would have an even smaller arena so that they won't stuck where the smaller enemies fit and such. In skyrim even thought the fighting system was lame, it worked the same in every scenario, they didn't designed the levels around the enemies, they did the opposite.

      in the cities, what most games do is putting NPC's in a certain location and pin them there. in skyrim all the characters move and do stuff. the game requires that they will interact with the character spontaneously on their own (not talk only if the player push a button). so the AI have to work in every situation possible but not to give up design choices for that.

      for me, skyrim tries to create human like AI with bots that do stuff for a reason that was thought of. it might not be the perfect system but it seemed to me like real characters living in a real world. take many other games and change the location of the characters, and suddenly the game crashes. also when a bard came to me in the open world and offered to sing for 5 septims, it raised the realism level by some 100 precent :))
    • Before I respond, I do want to mention that I say all of this out of love. Skyrim is a brilliant game and I've sunk a good 80+ hours into it. It just kills me how bad the AI is.

      Creating the illusion of intelligence is our business. AI programmers are just glorified illusionists. We're no where near modeling anything that's even remotely as intelligent as we are. I think we'll get there some day, but we're not there now. So we have to use smoke & mirrors. Saying that a particular AI is an illusion is not a shortcoming, it's a fact.

      Creating an open-world game is a very difficult challenge. I totally agree that the AI challenges faced on Skyrim are much more difficult than those faced by a typical shooter. I believe it was Jeff Orkin who said that the average life of an AI enemy in an FPS game is only a few seconds. That means that he only has to look intelligent for a few seconds to be believable. That usually involves diving for cover and shooting at you. AI agents in an open world are on screen much longer and most NPC's live for the entire game.

      A senior producer once asked me why creating the AI for The Sims is so much more expensive than creating AI for a shooter like Battlefield 3. Sim behavior pretty much is the game.

      Back to Skyrim, they failed horribly in a number of places. First, the pathfinding is terrible. My companion gets stuck on terrain so often that it's rarely worth even having a companion. Worst case, they at least teleport her. I've actually had my companion die multiple times because she got stuck on terrain. Good luck if you want to be a summoner. Speaking of which, enemies get stuck as well. This isn't hard. It's a problem the AI community solved a long time ago with freely available public papers on how to do it.

      Second, the combat AI is almost non-existent. Seeing me coming and then charging out of the fort and into my exploding fireball is not a tactically sound maneuver. I've had enemies accidentally kill themselves as well. They don't know how to use cover, they don't understand the terrain, they just seek you out in a very direct manner. There's little-to-no strategy.

      Third, dragon fights are meant to be this incredibly epic thing and they just aren't. The first few were, but after that, the fights become laughably easy. Dragons don't instill fear in me, they instill minor inconvenience.

      Finally, and this is a big one for me, is that every one of these problems exists in some form in every freakin' Bethesda game. I can forgive this stuff for a while, but it's been years.

      Their one saving grace is that they don't have static NPC's. Their NPC's have schedules and things to do, and it makes the towns feel alive. Whiterun feels more alive to me than Redcliffe from Dragon Age. The towns in general are much more alive than most games I've played and the amount of emergent gameplay you get from just having an open world is priceless.

      -Rez
    • Originally posted by Dash213
      I still think it's better then most games. A lot of games I played dealt with those problems by designing the level so only a very certain things can happen. I remember in Crysis 2 the AI seemed very good but it was an illusion, enemies would only fight in a specilised "arena" that work by a set of waypoints and have vary few decisions avilabe. and special enemies would have an even smaller arena so that they won't stuck where the smaller enemies fit and such. In skyrim even thought the fighting system was lame, it worked the same in every scenario, they didn't designed the levels around the enemies, they did the opposite.


      Based on the AI Roundtables I caught at GDC, that sounds more like success than failure. The theme that constantly came up was about being "fun" and a "good illusion", like Rez said, so the AI can be dumb as dirt, but as long as does what it's supposed to do without breaking immersion, that's a success. In the case of Skyrim, the AI basically couldn't stop breaking immersion, so I would largely consider that a failure (for AI, rest of the game was cool).

      James