A friend of mine told me that spore uses neural networks. Is this true? Do any/ any other games use neural networks? if not then is it viable or just plain daft to even try? Thanks.

I'm pretty sure that it does not. It definitely doesn't for the actual creature AI, I suppose it's possible that it uses it for the procedural animation system. However, I certainly haven't seen any official articles saying that it does. Generally NN are a very poor choice for game AI (can't tune it easily, PITA to train it, responds terribly when game design is changed which happens all the time before release, etc). I'm also pretty sure that EA are keeping the details for the Spore animation system pretty close to their chest for the moment.

The 2 successful examples that actually used NN I know are:

1) the pet AI in the game Black & White used a NN so that the pet would begin to play like the player

2) there was a pretty good bot written for Quake that used NN.

Otherwise, game AI is almost universally state machines.

-me

Quote: Original post by Palidine
1) the pet AI in the game Black & White used a NN so that the pet would begin to play like the player

Actually, the creature ended up using reinforcement learning. Similar, but much less "black box" than NN.

The game Creatures used a NN. There is a racing game that used pre-trained NNs to determine the drive line on the track -- but nothing dynamic in-game AFAIK.

Quote: Otherwise, game AI is almost universally state machines.

That is a serious oversimplification. Also, often you need to make sure you separate the concept of a framework (e.g. FSM, BT) and a decision-making process (e.g. weighted randoms). For example, you can use either weighted randoms or a NN (and many more) to provide decisions for the transitions in a FSM.

To the OP's question... there is almost NO usage of NNs in the game biz. And, rather than ask that we repost the reasons here, a quick search of this forum will harvest many bushels of threads discussing why this is the case.

As for Spore, put money on your friend's assertion then ask him to prove it. It will make a nice side-income.

These games use NN controlled AI:

- Creatures
- Black_&_White
- Colin_McRae_Rally_2
- NERO
- Forza_Motorsport

Source: http://wiki.aigamedev.com/FAQ/Which_Games_Use_Neural_Networks