<<http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/halo2-ai.htm>>

Cool article. I thought it was interesting when he mentioned that their behavior isn't random:

Quote:
We don't do things by random chance very much. The goal is not to create something that is unpredictable. What you want is an artificial intelligence that is consistent so that the player can give it certain inputs. The player can do things and expect the AI will react in a certain way. For example, if I sneak up behind a Grunt and surprise him, I expect him to run away. It would be bad if they only ran away half of the time, because then the player can build a plan that will only work half of the time.

It seems like the conventional strategy in writing AI is to NOT have strategies that work every time. Because, if you can find a reliable way to kill an enemy, then you can just abuse that flaw by killing everyone the exact same way.

But this guy seems to have thought of which strategies should work every time (like scaring the Grunts). It seems like making the enemies deterministic would require a ton of playtesting- to make sure there aren't any flaws that the player can abuse consistently.

But I can see how the gameplay could benefit from deterministic enemies. I mean, if sneaking up on a Grunt gets you killed 50% of the time, but successfully kills the grunt 50% of the time, then an expert player would just never do it. They would instead stick to more reliable (but more boring) ways of killing. But if it works 100% of the time (assuming you're successful at not getting spotted along the way), then that strategy will have its place in the player's repertoire. The end result is more interesting gameplay.

Quote: Original post by Mykre


<<http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/halo2-ai.htm>>

I cut and pasted the link (Beginning from "stuffo") Yet it wasn't found for some reason. Since I figured it might've been a typo, I omitted the "o" and simply worte "stuff"..... yet, that didn't seem to find a path either.

Quote: Original post by J-Maw
I cut and pasted the link (Beginning from "stuffo") Yet it wasn't found for some reason. Since I figured it might've been a typo, I omitted the "o" and simply worte "stuff"..... yet, that didn't seem to find a path either.

Try the clicky in my post. It's new and improved*

*disclaimer: neither new nor improved

Perfect. It went throught. Nice link.

It's quite interesting that they took the "AI has no more inputs than the player" approach. (Except for the few obvious simplifications)

That's unusual. At least, in my experience.

Now I wish I had played some of the single player stuff while I had access to halo 2, instead of just playing 8-P rocketball.

That is one really impressive AI architecture. Two things pop into mind as I read the article:

1. How much information do the NPC's keep in "memory" vs. just the world (like the object tags)

2. What structure do they use for keeping this information in memory in such a way that they can efficiently access and process it.

Fascinating. Reading that makes a few of the behaviors I saw make a bit more sense...I think I'll be able to exploit this newfound knowledge next time I play [grin]

I would love to get a chance to sit down and fiddle with some of their AI scripts. I'll love Bungie forever if the PC release comes with some authoring tools that allow just that...the architecture seems like it would make for some interesting challenges.

CM