I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don't want that to happen.
The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the behaviour of the game, and I believe they don't even want to understand how a machine learning AI can be possible. I even discussed my master thesis (an SVM based controller for enemies) with a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI (after that he just turned out and walked away)
I am still optimist that eventually that would happen. But I don't have enough patience to fight against that any more. So hopefully a young hacker reading this would change that :)
a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI
This makes me sad.. most RTS games have such terrible AI it often pains me to play them (and I love RTS games). Yeah yeah everything is moving towards online multiplayer, but I can't be the only person who would pay extra for a good single player experience, because often I really dislike the multiplayer experience and despite that I'm playing a lot of online games at the moment (Path of Exile, World of Tanks, League of Legends...), I usually prefer to play single player games and for this good AI is very important to me.
I love playing humans but same as you sometimes I want to take things my pace and it's a very different game from the kind of AI I want to be playing. And some of my friends hate playing humans, the games are too fast paced and they hate the shit-talk you sometimes get.
I remember reading THQ lamenting the decline in RTSes, as I watched RTSes from the two remaining greats move from base building to quick mini-troop production games. The trouble that people like THQ and Blizzard don't seem to realise is that though the sales of this game do great and people are playing lots of online matches, it's the next one that'll suffer the decline in sales as casuals abandon the increasingly online optimized experience.
I want hordes that aren't totally retarded so that each game is different. They need to start making horde modes that are actually varied and interesting, unlike the predictable drivel that DoW2 and SC2 were. The AI in those games was stupid, predictable and broken. It started fun as you raced to build your base in time, but after a few games it wasn't fun at all. You could set a stopwatch by when the computer would try and rush you.
I didn't work on DoW2 but I worked on CoH. The core AI engine was similar. CoH added features to improve group pathfinding and pathfinding for when terrain changed, etc. I don't remember all of the details since this was 5 or 6 years ago.
But the fundamental problem with AI is not building the AI. The problem is tuning the AI. You end up with a terribly tuned game if you give designers too many knobs or if your knobs look like a helicopter cockpit.
AI War is an excellent game and the AI does some surprisingly smart things sometimes (not to mention that you can have tens of thousands of units in a game).
But AI War is also a very different gameplay experience to most other RTS games, so while its a good game in its own right and does have good AI, it may leave you disappointed if you're looking for a more traditional experience.
Not to mention that its an insanely hard game but I guess that's the price you pay for "good" AI!
>I even discussed my master thesis (an SVM based controller for enemies) with a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI (after that he just turned out and walked away)
The game industry is broader than ever. Supreme Commander uses neural nets for its RTS AI:
Last time I played Supreme Commander 2 (about a year ago), had the most braindead AI I've seen in an RTS in a while. The single player skirmish (and I normally prefer skirmishes to campaigns) was therefore unsatisfying and frustratingly annoying to play due to shockingly bad AI.
>Last time I played Supreme Commander 2 (about a year ago), had the most braindead AI I've seen in an RTS in a while. The single player skirmish (and I normally prefer skirmishes to campaigns) was therefore unsatisfying and frustratingly annoying to play due to shockingly bad AI.
>Maybe they've updated and improved it?
Not an expert, but I believe it started off as a mod, and eventually the modder worked with the devs to integrate it into later patches in the game.
> What benefit would your machine learning AI bring to a RTS game?
Currently if I understand correctly, the traditional approach is to define a bunch of actions and figure out a realistic way to choose what action to perform, tuning a state machine carefully to make sure the character is realistic as well as beatable. I can imagine this takes a lot of work.
I think a huge benefit of machine learning could be to change the nature of the interface that the character designer has access to: instead of designing the character's internal states, probably relying on collaboration with a programmer, a designer could be tuning reward functions, which more naturally express the character's relationship with its environment.
In other words, the designer can now treat the character states as a black-box model, and instead worry directly about its input-output behavioural relationship, something I think an artist might have better intuition for compared to dealing with explicit state machines.
Being able to do design by means of tuning rewards and actions could help decouple design from programming, which I think would be hugely beneficial for industry.
> Currently if I understand correctly, the traditional approach is to define a bunch of actions and figure out a realistic way to choose what action to perform, tuning a state machine carefully to make sure the character is realistic as well as beatable. I can imagine this takes a lot of work.
The aim is not to produce a realistic response, but fun. It's much, much easier to produce a response that isn't fun than to produce one that is, and this is the problem. Often a complex, systemic AI needs much more tuning to be fun than a simpler, more authored AI. Fun is an emotional response so it's hard to define systemically.
> In other words, the designer can now treat the character states as a black-box model, and instead worry directly about its input-output behavioural relationship, something I think an artist might have better intuition for compared to dealing with explicit state machines.
Game designers are not the same as graphic designers or artists, they work exclusively in logic. Flow charts, decision trees and giant spreadsheets are standard tools of the trade.
However, there's certainly scope for being able to take the game designer's logic to a higher, more abstract level. Being able to remove some of the micro-management would be useful. I'm not sure that machine learning helps there though, it seems more of a planning problem.
As a big fan of Age of Empires series I have to disagree, after a while the game (even in hardest mode) becomes predictable and after that the solo mode game is pretty much done. That doesn't happens on a LAN party because humans evolve their strategies as their opponents gets better and that increases the life cycle of the game in orders of magnitude. Which would be a very important economical incentive for an on-line game.
The thing is some research has to be done for this and the game industry is not very healthy to support research.
The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the behaviour of the game, and I believe they don't even want to understand how a machine learning AI can be possible. I even discussed my master thesis (an SVM based controller for enemies) with a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI (after that he just turned out and walked away)
I am still optimist that eventually that would happen. But I don't have enough patience to fight against that any more. So hopefully a young hacker reading this would change that :)