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Original post by chuck22 in my opinion, announcers in sports games are just as annoying as announcers in real life. adding a bit of AI to it would make them more enjoyable, but probably a complete waste of cpu and memory usage.

Okay, lets try some socretes based logic here:
1) The point of games is to be enjoyable (last I checked)
2) Giving announcers AI would make them more enjoyable (sole citation above)
3) Giving announcers AI would be a complete waste of cpu and memory usage (sole citation above)
Ergo Games are a complete waste of cpu and memory usage.

What I am trying to question here, is, if something immerses you further into the game, and makes it more enjoyable, how is it a waste of cpu and memory?

With limited memory and processing time per frame you might have to choose between a sports game with smart opponents and a stupid commentator, or a game with stupid opponents and a smart commentator.

but then again ..i don't like sports games, so listening to the smart and funny remarks about the stupid players might be more fun after all [smile]

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Original post by glSmurf With limited memory and processing time per frame you might have to choose between a sports game with smart opponents and a stupid commentator, or a game with stupid opponents and a smart commentator. but then again ..i don't like sports games, so listening to the smart and funny remarks about the stupid players might be more fun after all [smile]

Actually that limit depends on how you design the game. Say you were doing a remake of the NES game "Arch Rivals". In which case a smart commentator would probably add to the game... heck a sarcastic one would probably get you even further into the game.

Now IIRC, Arch Rivals, has two on two basketball play, plus a referee. That means a maximum of four AIs plus the commentor.

Now, I may be wrong, but if you can run 8 Dark Sims on an N64, which consists of two generations old arcade hardware (gibbled mainly via lack of RAM--as far as I can tell, that is pretty much the only thing that really took down the N64). That is two generations old arcade hardware at today's date (current chipset for MIPS last I checked was ~6K. N64 ran on ~4K).

Based on this, I am sure on the XBox 360, even if you are running the JIT/XNA/C# setup that Microsoft allows Homebrew users to use, you could fit four AIs and heck, lets raise it to two commentators, easily.

Whatever the design looks like there will allways be a limit too how much you can add to the game. I don't say that every game will reach this limit, but the bigger the game is the closer you will get. With a small game like say tic-tac-toe you could probably get away with having 1000 different AIs picking the next move.
If you want to use AI for your commentator in your game then go ahead, I not trying to advice you against it. Im just trying to answer your question.

I was put in the position of doing the commentator for PDC World Championship Darts (yes, I am totally aware it seems to break at certain points and talk about the crowd, don't poke too hard), and it was literally a tree of if statements. It was the easiest approach, and chose what sort of thing to say based on events that are happening, sadly, most of the time the crowd as excitement only happens at particular points. Basically the tree was:

Has player hit a 'good' target on board ?{  Are they playing well in general?  {    Say something good  }  else   {    Have we said they are getting better?    {      Say something good    }    else    {      Say they are getting better    }  }}else{  Have we said something bad about them recently?  {    Say nothing  }  else  {    Say something bad  }}

Although the tree was a heck of a lot larger than this, and incorperated things about the crowd, their leg + set scores, etc etc. And sadly the length of a game highlighted the fact that we only had about 10-15 samples per group. So long games became repetitive.