HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ ChuckMcM

From PONG to this.

This is perhaps the most accessible way to appreciate just how much the increase in computation (both 'general purpose' and 'graphical') can be done on high end hardware these days.

True story, I was a big fan of Empire (ran on terminals, later became known as Bright's Empire) and when I went to Intel and worked on their 'high end' graphics chip (82786, used in exactly one video card from Number 9) we thought maybe someday you would be able to see the units battling cities rather than have your A turn a city '*' into an 'O'. Little did I know ...

⬐ johnohara

Empire under VMS through DECUS. You stopped me dead in my tracks Chuck. Fond memories of a heady time when we kids were tasked with building clusters that ran and ran and ran.

Thank you.

⬐ Gring

All that great tech, and the end result is just another game where you shoot people until they're dead, then repeat with more people. Sad, really.

⬐ nettdata

Not true at all.

We're currently in the beta testing phase of our game where you get to shoot mechs until they're dead. http://mwomercs.com

Totally different than people.

⬐ dsl

Please stop browsing HN so we can have this game sooner.

Love, The Internet

⬐ nik_0_0

Seen the trailer, looks awesome! Keep up the good work :)

⬐ nickik

Come up with something more fun then shooting down virtual people and earn a lot of money.

⬐ None

None

⬐ harryf

So lets try to really break this one down.

Game development costs significant money so gameplay can't take significant risks. Any viable alternative must be able to generate comparable returns. Cynically put, for a game to be a success, there needs to be enough instant gratification for mass appeal. Same lessons from Hollywood...

First person shooters a popular primarily because they give us an adrenaline rush, with secondary effects like boosting your ego if you play multi-player. That's why the format works.

So what other options are there?

You could invent another format that produces similar adrenaline rushes such as Amnesia, which is really just a spin on the FPS. Perhaps there are similar things you could try by simulating, say, a rollercoaster or a jet fighter.

But what else is there which provides the same immediate gratification of an adrenaline rush? An endorphin rush...

Now here the obvious choice would be sex, and I'm sure the porn industry is watching closely, but there's too high a risk of censorship for the mainstream game industry I guess; our society is much happier with violence than sex.

But another trigger of endorphins is relaxation. What about games which, when you play for an hour, you finish feeling relaxed, happy and calm? Take flow for example - http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ - there's even a learning element there. Throw in some elements for player creativity, and you have your secondary ego boosts for longer term gratification. I don't think is has been explored enough to understand the potential, so risk is high but at the same time, rewards could also be high if you're the first on the scene.

⬐ cowkingdeluxe

This is incorrect. Whether it's the UDK engine or Cry Engine, you can do some amazing things with them if you have the capability. You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making.

⬐ baddox

That is also incorrect. Making an FPS does not imply that you are incapable of creating another type of game.

⬐ cowkingdeluxe

"You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making."

It seems clear to me that I implied that being only capable of making an FPS means you are locked into making an FPS.

⬐ Gring

If you look at sales, 95% of Cry Engine game boxes sold were first person shooters. I don't expect anything different for the future.

⬐ replax

While it's true that most of them are FPS, I don't think it is 95%. Look at Aion for example (MMORPG)

⬐ None

None

⬐ kaeluka

might be; but fact is: that's not the only thing, the engine allows you to make

⬐ Gring

Sure there might be an outlier of a good game somewhere. But the current market drives future innovation.

And the current market is "crap sells well". Let's guess what everybody is working on...

⬐ None

None

⬐ cowkingdeluxe

And what about UDK, which is similar engine but with more widespread adoption?

⬐ huhtenberg

Where's Jonathan Blow when we need him? Seriously though, cross this level of graphics with a storyline centered around exploration of a creatively made-up world, and it'd could be a birth of a game genre - an exploration as a game.

⬐ el_presidente

Something like GTA?

⬐ wlesieutre

Busy working on The Witness. IIRC, they're not using a premade engine for it.

⬐ teamonkey

If you have an engine like CryEngine3 you need hoards of people creating content to make it look good. If you have hoards of people creating that content, you need to sell a lot of copies to pay their wages. To sell a lot of copies, you have to make something that appeals to the mass market. The mass market, at least for those who care about the kind of graphics attainable only through top-of-the-line game engines, wants straightforward mechanics where they kill things, providing a black-and-white scenario where they can feel that they have won.

⬐ gosub

http://dear-esther.com/ is a good example of using modern game media for story-telling.

⬐ Gring

Yes. Portal was also an amazing use of modern game tech without being destructive.

⬐ greeneggs

It's an interface problem. In the real world, for example, I prefer ultimate frisbee to laser tag, but in a video game we can't simulate anything more than point and shoot.

⬐ archangel_one

In some ways the tech encourages that, unfortunately; the huge numbers they quote for the Xbox 360 (which incidentally is 7, not 10) are only achievable with heavily vectorised code which implies heavy graphics work rather than AI. I guess they'd say that's what the market wants though.

⬐ daenz

If money from that is what it takes to drive the tech forward, I'm fine with it. Someone has to supply the cash to push this stuff forward, why not young adults that love shooters?

⬐ Gring

That's a good point. But the end result should be "lots of great games". And I can't find them.

This paragraph best sums it up:

“Watch this—it never fails,” he said, bending over his computer keyboard. On one of his twin monitors, Hecker pulled up the movie-trailers section of Apple.com; on the other, he loaded the upcoming-releases page of GameSpot.com. The movies, Hecker pointed out, encompassed a huge diversity of topics and approaches, from buddy comedies to period dramas to esoteric art films. The video games, on the other hand, were almost all variations on a single theme: outlandishly attired men armed with gigantic weapons, shooting things.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most...

⬐ sp332

It's helpful if you don't think of them as telling separate stories. It's more like watching different interpretations of Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet. It's basically the same story over and over, but if it's told well, then it can still be entertaining.

⬐ ctdonath

Somehow Total Recall (premise of the short story[1], as illustrated by the movies) seems a good starting point for this discussion: what do you want to remember for the first time? and have it unique to your experience?

([1] - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, but everybody knows it as Total Recall.)

⬐ Gring

Well, an audience that doesn't look for variety, that instead only wants to hear the same story told over and over again - that's an uncultured audience in my book, no matter what story.

⬐ betterth

This is pretty offensive to anyone who actually plays FPS games and isn't just bitching from the outside.

There are some great FPS's with amazing stories that make up a large part of the bedrock that is gaming as a cultural medium.

They are not retellings of the same story any more than Oscar-bait movies are retellings of other stories.

It's like saying "don't look at Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as separate stories, instead think of them as different interpretations of the monomyth. It's the same story over and over, but if done well it can still be entertaining".

When all's said and done, I'd like to call them separate stories. Identifying the common plots and tropes doesn't make them the same at heart.

⬐ sp332

Well maybe I had it backwards. Maybe FPS's are trying to tell different stories but for some reason they all try to use the same tools to do it. Really, shooting people is not the best way to tell most stories. The creators of the Drake's Uncharted series, really great FPS games, are complaining that it's hard to get any serious dramatic emotion in a game that has you getting shot at most of the time.

⬐ betterth

What do you propose the player does in an action oriented, modern, gun-based game? What skill based mechanic can eat up 30 hours of a 40 hour game and is superior to point and click FPS shooting?

At the end of the day, your player has to PLAY the game and I guess I can understand the frustration of the grinding and the mechanic, but I fail to see what is superior.

Maybe people want more games like Heavy Rain? I loved Heavy Rain, it was an incredibly engaging and emotional story. I had a great connection with the characters and story, but there's only one problem: it's basically a choose your own adventure movie. Lots of watching, some playing, very little skill involved.

⬐ spacemanaki

I don't think anyone is suggesting this is an easy problem or that there is some answer already out there for the taking. You can lament that state of the art gaming technology is put to use pandering to largely adolescent and tremendously violent fantasies without knowing all the answers.

That being said, a great example of simple, (relatively) nonviolent gameplay giving way to countless hours of playing time is Minecraft. A Minecraft or even BridgeBuilder clone with this CryEngine would be pretty rad.

⬐ sp332

Blue Lacuna http://playthisthing.com/blue-lacuna is a modern, ambitious adventure game with no graphics at all. Actually there's lots of drama in "interactive fiction" games, but most of them aren't 30 hours long. I think it's possible for RTS's to have strong storylines, require skill and interactivity, and fancy graphics to boot. Although I'm not sure it's a strictly better medium for storytelling, at least it's different.

Edit - continuing:

Ico is fairly engaging and even intense in places, and it doesn't involve guns. Little flash games like N+ are actiony and you don't have to shoot people. I think a AAA high-budget game with N+ mechanics would be awesome. Darwinia is a good example of telling a story in a RTS.

Lots of games, even FPS games, involve stealth. So that's something you can do in an "action oriented, modern, gun-based game" other than killing hordes of random enemies. Another action-oriented mechanics is hand-to-hand combat, from realistic(ish) UFC fighting games to Ninja Gaiden or even Mad World.

⬐ baddox

Why is that sad? Should "great tech" only be used to create the kinds of video games you like?

⬐ Gring

It's my opinion, baddox. Look at this video (from the atlantic jonathon blow article), then tell me the state of video games is just fine: http://bcove.me/vf4eof01

⬐ None

None

⬐ jQueryIsAwesome

Its all related to your perception; maybe the constructions falls over you if you hit them hard enough, and maybe there is a part where the place is full of mirrors and you hardly can tell the difference between an enemy and his reflection... but all this little things probably doesn't make it a "new game" for you; but for some people it does.

⬐ ChuckMcM

Perhaps, I don't think we've seen a Crysis powered porno, that would be popular with the kids :-)

I think though that you've may have conflated cause and effect. This sort of engine isn't really useful in a poker game. Do you remember the beautifully rendered ChessMaster games on the Amiga? I remember people talking about a 'waste of the graphics' to render chess pieces like that.

I don't think anyone has done a good Myst replacement, this might be good for that too. An archeology game? possibly. Remember that the 'engine' and the 'game' are two different things. Perhaps the 'safest' thing to imagine is an FPS, known audience, known play etc etc. Licensing isn't cheap, so if you're paying for it you don't want to risk that capital on a hyper realistic 'angry birds' now do you?

Some other thoughts on uses for an engine that does good visuals:

  1 Mechanical puzzles - build machines to solve puzzles.
  2 Life/City/Population simulators - more fun to watch.
  3 Sex games - mentioned above.
  4 Sports games - haven't had a decent FP kayaking game
  5 Where's Waldo type

I'm sure there are others.

⬐ Gring

Oh no, my point isn't about cause and effect. I believe that when they set out to do a great graphics engine, they don't have derivate, tasteless games in mind. They're actually doing innovative, great things well worth their time.

The problem is the other half of their studio, which creates games based on those engines. This is where all the problems lie. No taste.

And it's not just Far Cry and Crysis. Check out their recently released iOS game "Fibble". It's tasteless horse radish.

⬐ nazgulnarsil

Horse radish is hardly tasteless. Is this a colloquialism I'm unaware of?

⬐ Gring

No, but "tasteless horse radish" is a completely useless thing. Which is my point.

⬐ OzzyB

Are you allowed to make a porn game with this engine?

I ask in all seriousness... I'm thinking maybe the licence of this engine comes with certain terms?

⬐ DanBC

Wait, "Where's Waldo" but in 3d, from first person perspective?

   6 Paparazzi - Start with a lousy camera, have to take
     photos which are graded for score.  Get better lenses
     and access to better hiding places as level ups.
     (This is like a FPS, but with no guns, and with 
     the enemy on a pre-determined route and with strict           
     time limits for each level)

   7 Tree in the Field - you start in a field.
     There's a tree.  You wander around.  You can
     climb the tree.  You can run. As you do certain
     things (start running, for example) a timer 
     starts with a recommendation ("Hey! How fast
     can you run round the field? / Climb the tree?
     / etc".  You find a magnifying glass.  You can
     look at bugs.  You can look at stones (and the
     fossils).  You can look at flowers.  The weather
     changes.  The day turns into night.  You find 
     a box.  When you find the box another prompt 
     pops up "Hey! This looks like a good place to
     keep your fossils!".  There is a rich and 
     diverse eco-system, with hooks into information
     about everything ("This is a 'Cowslip' (*Primula 
     veris*)" - but then more links if wanted.  Right 
     down to high level biology concepts.)  You can 
     race bugs against each other.  You find some
     seeds, and a trowel, and some rickety rackety 
     implements.

   7a Tree in the Field DLC - A Toolshed for the
      equipment / A mini greenhouse / etc etc.

⬐ Gring

Wow, absolutely love the Paparazzi concept. Have you got more ideas like these?

⬐ po

How about "You are the Road"

http://www.kongregate.com/games/duckets/you-are-the-road-mol...

This game came out of a game hackfest called the molyjam where each team had to pick a game idea from a Peter Molyneux's faker's twiter stream: https://twitter.com/petermolydeux

⬐ DanBC

I have millions of ideas. Ideas are nothing - delivery is everything. I am unable to deliver anything.

⬐ follower

Au contraire, you delivered a reply within 2 hours. :)

Perhaps you are too hard on yourself. (Although given you live in the UK that's likely a pre-requisite for continued residence...)

⬐ Splines

> 6 Paparazzi - Start with a lousy camera, have to take photos which are graded for score. Get better lenses and access to better hiding places as level ups. (This is like a FPS, but with no guns, and with the enemy on a pre-determined route and with strict time limits for each level)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Snap

Your "tree in the field" idea sounds like something Peter Molyneux might promise ;).

⬐ mcmire

I'm fine with more realistic graphics as long as that's not the whole point of the game (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). What I really have yet to see is AAA games put effort into making human behavior realistic (in real time, I mean, not in a cutscene). Like, would it kill ya to actually make the sound match up with the mouth once in a while?? This is 2012 and still there are only a handful of games that get even remotely close (Mass Effect, Battlefield 3 and then of course L.A. Noire and other mocapped games - I'm sure there are others, I don't play games but they're all the same to some extent). I think the thing about graphics game companies don't realize is, the better you make the graphics, the better you have to make everything around it to match -- character behavior, gameplay mechanics, etc. -- because the differences between the different parts of games are exaggerated -- you leave out some detail and the magic disappears. Games are just multi-faceted magic tricks, same for TV shows. The better you can hide the magic -- that's where the realism lies. Better graphics is just one part of the puzzle.

⬐ datasage

Even current gaming engines can be used to produce some very amazing visuals, but games still have to be able to run on hardware that is 5 years old.

Its not very cost effective to create content at a quality that only a small number of users are going to be able to see.

⬐ aqme28

Still, I'm glad someone's doing it.

⬐ beaumartinez

What makes you think CryEngine can't run on older hardware? As a demo, they're naturally showing the engine at its best.

Games "last" quite a long time, too—by catering first to the high-end and then downsampling to be able to run on older hardware you make things "future-proof". When you release your game on iOS in a decade, it'll still look great :-)

⬐ kmfrk

The music made me feel like I was watching a modern Fantasia. Fascinating stuff - although, as people here say, what matters is what it's used for.

⬐ rollypolly

The video reminds me of demoscene demos.

⬐ pinchyfingers

I probably wouldn't have even watched that video if I hadn't just finished watching Moleman 2.

⬐ vibrunazo

It's funny because it has "future of gaming" and "console" in the same article.

⬐ troymc

The top paid game apps in the iTunes app store right now are: Draw Something, Angry Birds Space, Clear Vision, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, TETRIS, Bejeweled, Skylanders Cloud Patrol, and Cut the Rope.

None of those games would be improved by increasing photorealism.

⬐ Marwy

What is your point? These games are for fucking i(phone|pad), so you can play them in a train while you're traveling to work. This is entirely different kind of games.

⬐ envex

I think he was making the point that Gameplay > Graphics.

⬐ troymc

Mobile devices are the future, both in terms of total units in use, and total dollar spent on software. Therefore, the top paid games on the iTunes app store are a good indicator of where the true "future of gaming" lies.

⬐ nihilocrat

Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering...

...but...

Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.

⬐ Negitivefrags

I see this kind of sentiment all the time from people outside the game development industry. Every single time a new graphics card is launched, a new console, a new engine, whatever.

Do people really think that it's a matter of CPU time goes in and intelligence comes out?

People seem to think that if we were not spending so much time on graphics, that we would have amazing AI by now, but it's simply not the case.

The reason we use simple state based AI's for the most part comes down to controllability.

In order to actually design a fun gameplay experience you need to have ways to tweak the AI to behave in the way that the player will find fun. You want to be able to ask "Why did that character not throw a grenade in this situation?", be able to find the answer, and tweak it.

The techniques that come out of AI research don't expose parameters in this form, and so are essentially useless for real game AI.

Probably the biggest CPU use from AI today are perception checks, like can entity X see entity Y from it's location. Checks like these tend to cross cut into engine code and just feed into the very simple state based AI.

⬐ Arwill

The problem with current AI is that it is programmed. Thus it stretches to where the programmer programmed it. AI needs to learn, it needs to be let to produce emergent behaviors, not just those which were programmed into it.

⬐ gavanwoolery

I would argue against this -- you can make very effective AI without machine learning. I think that perhaps what your are trying to say is that current AI feels too "hand-scripted" -- if X, then Y. Agree about emergent behavior totally, but emergent behavior can be produced without machine learning. Simple example:

Enemies set of motivations: kill the player

Knowledge base: 1) An organism can be killed with an excessive amount of directed energy (heat, force, etc). 2) The player is an organism 3) Some general rules about the physical world (how gravity works, how fire works, what switches and levers activate which objects, blah blah blah).

Now, the enemy might take some pre-programmed path to kill the player (like fire a gun at the player). Or, if circumstances dictate that it is best, they might produce a more "creative," emergent approach. Say, for example, the enemy pulls a lever. This was never added in by the programmer. The lever activates a trap door, above the players head, and a bunch of boulders crush the player. Switch action -> directed energy -> kill organism -> player death.

In shorter words, it really comes down to the programmer determining an effective knowledge base (abstraction), and letting the AI run wild with reasoning. :) This is not to say machine learning wouldn't be the icing on the cake, but you could just as well let enemies (or NPCs) have the knowledge before the game is launched without having to learn it.

⬐ jamesaguilar

There was a post on Gamasutra by one of the Civ IV devs talking about this very problem. It turns out that most players don't really want an enemy that makes perfect moves most of the time. The problem with AI is not making it hard enough, but making it feel good to win against. That's a much more difficult problem than making a good AI in many games.

⬐ antihero

It would be cool to see incredibly rare behaviours, such as if you are going up against a bunch of mercs, wipe the floor with all of them, and round the corner and shove your rifle into the last one's face he'd be like "fair cop mate, I'm out of here". This would only happen every once in a while but it would be a fantastic reward for the player to feel like they can, if they do well enough or play in a certain style, make the AI feel simulated emotions - fear, rage, complacency, etc. So if you snuck through the building and carefully knocked out guys they might not be fearful, but complacent, but if you did the same thing and brutally fucked them all up with knifes, they'd be much more alert but fearful and prone to error.

Personally I don't think this would be hard to simulate, for instance fear would be marked with increased cursing, decreased accuracy, increased error, and a potential for full scale running away. Complacency would mean that guards don't check every corner on their patrol routes, have smaller visual cones, and are slower to react when shit hits the fan. Confidence could be marked by seeking cover less, drastically increased accuracy, and so on.

So yes, whilst in the distant future we could have truly "intelligent" AI which would lead to unpredictable gameplay, we at present have the tools to create enemies that can provide a much richer and more vast array of feedback to the player's behaviour.

⬐ AndyNemmity

"It would be cool to see incredibly rare behaviours"

Working in game design with complex AI, I can tell you that the last thing players ever want is rare behaviors. They tend to think of these things as bugs even if they are simply that, rare behaviors.

Then again, I've been working in game systems where the rare behaviors are sometimes positive and sometimes negative for the player. Given this, the negative ones stand out as "bugs" even if they are not.

⬐ ssharp

I think labeling it the "future of gaming" is simply for attention. If anything, we're not talking about much more than the next iteration of consoles.

While XBox and Sony were battling over who could have the prettiest graphics, Nintendo made lots of money with the Wii's unimpressive hardware, and Apple (maybe even unintentionally) and other smartphone manufacturers came in and revolutionized the mobile gaming market with unimpressive gaming hardware.

There is a "future of gaming" for consoles and more serious gamers, and there is a "future of gaming" for more casual gamers.

⬐ dkersten

Agreed - the future of gaming should be in gaming.

One of my favourite games is The Witcher 2 because it explores player choice with branching story lines. A lot of things you do in the game change things later on in ways that few other games do.

⬐ hbz

Crytek isn't going to do your job for you, they make the tools that others use to make high interactive gameworlds and characters. They also happen to make a game from their engine called Crysis but I wouldn't call the be-all-end-all of FPSs.

⬐ lbj

Very valid point. In my opinion Crysis 2 sucked ass purely because it was a technical showcase more than an engaging gaming experience, unlike Mass Effect 3 for instance.

⬐ None

None

⬐ Cushman

Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off.

AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, really stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that at all is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism.

Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.

⬐ InclinedPlane

Static photorealistic scenes are still a pretty hard problem. If it was just "ray tracing and you're done" it'd be a different story. You have complex lighting interactions (best modelled using the radiosity technique) and you have complex sub-surface light interactions which are a prominent compnent to making ordinary human skin appear real. These aren't even completely solved problems in the state of the art today.

Now, all of that is just square zero. A mere preface to the real problems: realistic animation and realistic interactivity. You can make a pretty decent photorealistic world with current technology but it would have to be an untouchable, unmoving, unrealistic frozen world. Adding in animations is a problem at the same computational intensity as the rendering problem. And making the world capable of being interacted with a level of fidelity approaching the quality of the rendering and animation is a problem so lacking in proposed solutions that it doesn't even have a sound theoretical underpinning yet.

⬐ dualogy

Classical raytracing by itself is highly unrealistic unless you also implement an add-on physical-based rendering-equation-solver such as Path Tracing or Photon Mapping. The first one beginning highly noisy and "converging" to photo-realistic over a looong time -- the second being only as realistic as the number of photons your hardware can manage.

Now without such a physical-based rendering-equation-solver, realtime raytracing of "simple scenes" (couple of spheres and boxes) is doable today. The more complex your scenes get (even with acceleration structures), the more you need to lower your viewport resolution. Your high-end desktop GPU can then handle raytracing for a low-end "mobile" resolution such as 320x240 or whatever. But your low-end mobile GPU probably can't. Also for fully accurate antialiasing you'd need to render at 2x your resolution and downscale.

tl;dr: realtime raytracing of simple scenes is feasible, realtime photorealistic full-screen antialiased raytracing of complex scenes isn't and if current tech development trends continue, won't be for another decade perhaps.

I don't see "we're really close to pulling it off" because as GPU flops and caps happily increase, so do unfortunately screen resolutions. In realtime raytracing, we're always lagging behind and always have to compromise: (1) high resolution, (2) antialiasing, (3) complex scenes, (4) photo-realism -- for real-time speeds, pick any two.

⬐ aidenn0

I didn't read the grandparent as saying we are really close to real-time path tracing; I read it more as real-time rasterization is getting rapidly closer to looking like path tracing both in the quality of the scenes and the types of scenes it can represent.

Also FLOPS has been increasing much faster than resolutions. 1920x1200 is about 3x the pixels of 1024x768. Graphics FLOPS has increased way more than 3x since 1024x768 was considered a high-resolution screen.

⬐ dualogy

Good points ... that's a silver lining, too =)

⬐ dclowd9901

I think the fact that strides have been made in the general area of dynamicizing certain actions (like simultaneously rendering mouth movements with spoken language in games) are steps toward that grand goal of games having AI that not only acts smart, but even has dynamic scripting, based on "observances" and other environmental stimuli. Also, hinted/dynamic animation is pretty unbelievable now. Just see how real it looks when a character is tackled in a Madden game.

I'm confident even the "hard" problems will be solved in the very near future.

⬐ Cushman

That's a good point, and maybe I was too binary in my original statement-- there are a lot of parts of NPC design that are more physics simulation than AI. I'd still say there's a categorical distinction between "respond appropriately to being hit by a linebacker" and "respond appropriately to someone putting a bucket on your head", though. Like you say, we're close to realism on the former; much farther from the latter.

⬐ arketyp

>Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off.

That's a good point. And I don't even think it's so much about AI being really hard as it is about photorealism being such a clear goal. Because really there is no limit to the other dynamics that can be explored that aren't as unattainable as a human AI. I still think the ghosts in Pac-man are clever. And while I'm by no means tuned in on the gaming community today, just the fact that you still play these super good-looking games with a few buttons and two joysticks says a lot.

⬐ gavanwoolery

As someone who has worked intensively both in the fields of rendering and AI, I can say there are easy and hard problems in both. There is much in the way of AI that we already know, it's just that your average developer actually knows very little about AI (not trying to be insulting, it's just been true in my experience) -- and much more so your average company or publisher does not care to fund AI beyond enemies that can throw themselves into your gun barrel. Propositional logic, expert systems, backwards chaining, and neural networks are very powerful tools that we know a lot about, but most games rarely implement (perhaps trivially at most). We still tend to hand-design/script quests, when these fields of AI could provide very powerful emergent gameplay. What it mostly boils down to (for the sake of interesting gameplay) is proper knowledge-representation (i.e. abstraction) and reasoning (a prolog-like reasoning system would be a good start). And of course, path-finding/locomotion is pretty much a given. Interestingly, it is less about implementing these and more about designing a game that can use them properly - almost without doubt you need to create a game world that functions on its own, where every NPC has its own set of motivations, which is a very different task from creating a game that is limited to what the player does.

Other than that, there are still plenty of hard problems left in rendering, especially with regards to effective procedural generation (which arguably falls more under modeling). Our ray tracing is still far from "realistic" - take a more complex scene than a table with a wine glass, and we can still usually discern the difference, especially with complex materials and subsurface scattering (human skin STILL does not look quite right). As it is, we are only able to calculate light travel by points (we use the term ray tracing, but typically every ray does a number of steps, unless every model is mathematically calculated). Light travel should be determined by complex volumes -- which is pretty much impossible to simulate on today's hardware ( O(n^6) magnitude at least - growing by volume, travel distance, number of objects, volume bounces (dear god), and number of pixels calculated ).

⬐ sbierwagen

With AI, there's also the problem of being more accurate than you want to be. A triple-A title like MW3 or Skyrim is essentially "a movie you walk through". NPCs have lines, they follow a script.

You could easily have NPCs that run a little life simulation, (like in the early versions of Oblivion) but then you have the problem of NPCs going off the script. If you accurately simulate mental states, and some villager rolls a 1 on the d2000 mental state die, then proceeds to kill all the plot-critical NPCs in their village? Now you've got a more realistic, yet completely broken, game.

⬐ sycren

If you were to accurately simulate mental states, there would need to be some kind of cause like the player murdering all the NPC's friends in front of them to end up on 1 rather than a randomly generated value

⬐ visural

It seems to me, the problem with AI as applied to gaming, is that just having "good AI" doesn't mean having the smartest AI that can kick the player's butt, it means having AI that the player can observe and formulate strategies against. If it doesn't behave in a human way, and make it's decisions clear to the player then it's not fun.

In short, for gaming the measure of good AI is "fun", not "intelligence".

⬐ wisty

Also, better rendering is generally better (unless you want a cartoony cell renderer).

Better AI might not always be better. You don't want stupid AI bugs, but you don't necessarily want the AI to be smarter than the player. You may want an AI with a realistic character, but maybe not. Good AI makes some sense in a sandbox world, but it's not necessarily fun.

⬐ lloeki

> your average company or publisher does not care to fund AI beyond enemies that can throw themselves into your gun barrel

Ironically the game where I've seen the most convincing AI currently is the Forza Motorsport series (increasing with each release). There is nothing short of impressive in seeing opponent drivers trying to pressure you to fault, intentionally breaking on you way after the apex just when you are about to floor it, showing excess of confidence throwing them out of the track, or reacting to pressure you put on them (you can literally see some panicking or getting aggressive in their driving), learning to clock faster times lap after lap and race after race, and even from your own lines. Sure they're nowhere near a real human, and with experience you can land better times than the AI and outsmart them, but there's plenty of physics and graphics going on already and there are trade-offs to be made.

⬐ gideons

In a video game anything the player doesn't see is a waste of time. In the case of games with large branching story lines it's a tradeoff between putting effort in to content which might be unseen and adding "depth." AI is the same. A genius AI that does all kinds of magic in the background is useless if the player never gets to see the magic.

Games don't want true AI solutions, they want to entertain the player. Put enough veneer on the world to make the player suspend disbelief and move on. Anything else is a waste of money for the most part.

⬐ Cushman

I hope I didn't seem to be implying there weren't hard problems in both fields-- but I do think there's a bigger gap in the current state of the art than you claim.

The path to realism in graphics is pretty clear because the real-world behavior of light is well-understood. There may be equations yet to be perfected, and challenges in efficiently simulating that behavior, but the direction is never in question; you can always tell if you've made it look more realistic or less.

By contrast, AI in games has reached a local maxima; the combination of pathfinding, scripted cues, an elaborate finite state machine, and a few basic heuristics is capable of simulating human behavior well enough, and with few enough glitches, that it presents a realistic universe to the player so long as they don't exceed the scripted bounds. However, if they do exceed those bounds, the whole thing appears paper-thin. You can extend the bounds with additional effort in scripting, but not infinitely, and with diminishing returns-- and doing so gets you no closer to having real AI which would be able to make those same decisions on its own.

Striking out and attempting to make an intelligent NPC-directed world from scratch... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I haven't seen anything, from AAA titles to indie games to tech demos, to imply it's coming soon.

But maybe that's just because I haven't seen the Minecraft of AI-driven gameplay yet.

⬐ gavanwoolery

Good points :)

I am actually working on such an AI system, believe it or not (As I am sure quite a few others are)! I don't doubt my algorithms, because I have already prototyped them and they work (at least well enough to create some interesting, if flawed gameplay), but I do doubt that I will ever get a game out that uses them effectively (making even a simple game is incredibly hard, and I have a bad habit of creating overly-complex stuff).

Your traditional AAA game does, as you mention, basically use finite state machines to determine enemy behavior (and incredibly simple ones, at that).

Why is a FSM bad?

Because someone MUST explicitly declare every combination of situation, and the paths between them.

How does my system work? It uses a combination of AI techniques that have been around a long time (just never used effectively in games).

1) Rules and queries (like prolog), with backwards chaining and propositional logic (basically a big, graph-based system). How might this work? Let's pose a few fake rules and a query. A) apples are red B) oranges are orange. C) apples and oranges are fruit D) red fruit is good...QUERY: are apples good? Using backwards chaining, this can easily be deduced.

2) Motivators and deterrents. Every NPC has their own set of motivations, as well as "bad" things they try to avoid. They attempt to maximize their output towards attaining their goals, prioritized with various points (i.e. get food: 1 point, stay alive: 10,000 points, etc)....the best outcome can be found with any traditional AI system (like a minmax tree, A*, or whatever is appropriate for the given case). This is not just about food or living, but can be emotional concepts like "seek happiness" or concepts that involve the physical world "find shelter"...

3) Basic AI for sensory and locomotion purposes (line of site, perception, planning, gathering knowledge, etc.)

4) Abstraction of communication -- not at the syntactical level, and not at the grammar level, but in its crudest terms ("higher level language")...I call it caveman-speak but there has to be a better phrase...i.e. "Me Hungry" or "Why You Steal" -- using sentence fragments, you can construct a variety of phrases without giving the computer a hard time interpreting it. On the surface, you can throw in the syntactical sugar to make it sound less crude to the user, but on the backend writing a full-blown english parser is not a wise idea.

5) There is more, but I won't type it out here...

In the simplest terms, think of it like an empty stage in a play. There is no director (Finite State Machine) but there are characters and props, and the characters have backstories/motivations/genetic makeup/birthrights that determine what they will do and how they will react to changes in their environment. When you have rules, motivators, and a knowledge base, you can let the AI run wild -- and producing new rules grows with linear complexity, rather than exponential (as with a FSM).

Alternatively, if you even played the Sims, imagine something like that, but with more comprehensive AI (NPCs seek to maximize their comfort levels (id) while acting within their restraints (ego/super ego)).

You can track my progress (or lack thereof) at gavanw.com...unfortunately I work a fulltime job in addition, so development is occasionally slow.

⬐ Cushman

Sounds like the Minecraft of AI-driven gameplay... I would like to subscribe to your newsletter :)

⬐ gavanwoolery

That makes 2 subscribers ;)

⬐ scorpioxy

Make that 3.

I've always wondered why game rules have to be so rigid (use a state machine) and always thought it was the technology but what you described makes sense and makes use of older technology but in new applications.

I just took one AI course while in college but got hooked ever since.

Question: Can you expand on the motivators and deterrents concept? Specifically, how do you relate something like "getting food" with the world objects? Assigning points to specific world objects(apple, cow, chicken...) seems to get us back to a state-machine like game. Humans have experience (memory and patterns) to guide them, what would the characters have?

⬐ gavanwoolery

Yes, to answer your question, there are many ways to go about implementing it, but here is how I do it:

In reality, you have one knowledge base, which is simply a set of facts/rules about the world. For example...

a) berries are fruit b) red fruit is good (+1 score) c) green fruit is bad (-1 score) d) enemies are dangerous e) eating while in danger is bad (-10 score) f) eating while full is bad (-2 points)

In a finite state machine, you would have to have several combinations of state (are berries present? are enemies present? are you full? etc). Say (for argument's sake) you have 5 possible states (binary). In a FSM, this would have 32 possible permutations of the states, which all must have corresponding actions associated with them. In a motivation based system, it simply evaluates each state individually, and adds up the points. It chooses to pursue the state that gives the most points. So, here, that would be eating red fruit while enemies are not present.

The way prolog-like systems work, the computer does not have to have ANY idea what food or hunger or anything like that is -- it can be completely oblivious to abstract concepts. All it is doing, in essence, is (searching for and) matching strings. Those strings are the identifiers used for classes (or instances) of game world objects, NPCs, etc. So if you gave an NPC a motivator (kill(enemy) = +10 points, Bob = enemy, get_caught_doing(kill) = -100 points), it will find the best way to kill Bob while avoiding negative consequences. This is (obviously) metacode, and the actual implementation would require better organization and more explicit syntax.

Make sense?

⬐ scorpioxy

Yup, makes sense.

I have written exactly 15 lines of prolog but I'm somewhat aware of how they work. This is great stuff, but as you said the devil is in the details. Please consider writing up your experiences and sharing it on HN.

⬐ gavanwoolery

Definitely, will do :) It is also encouraging to see that people are interested in this.

⬐ creamyhorror

Sign me up as well. I look forward to small-scale deployments of more 'genuine' AI in games.

⬐ sycren

Very interesting, with your work on voxels will modellers soon have to model the inside of objects - eg) Rather than modelling the human 'skin', model each part - clothes, body, tissue, bone?

⬐ gavanwoolery

Well, traditional polygon-based systems will be around a long time, but I do plan to keep everything volumetric in my engine. However, for the most part a lot of the volumes are procedurally generated (i.e. the wood pattern inside a trunk is a function of distance and angle from the trunk's center).