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| Re: Halo AI: has it progressed? Where could it go? | |
| Posted By: scarab | Date: 11/1/11 10:07 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Halo AI: has it progressed? Where could it go? (davidfuchs) : Your idea about eye-contact makes sense from a realism standpoint I hadn't : considered. But frankly in that respect I want more gameplay changes. I : want allies so 'smart' that losing them is an active detriment to that : player--or enemies that don't just know where you disappeared, but : actively try to flush you out. I think that there is a conflict between having enemies that press forward to flush you out and Halo's territory taking gameplay mechanic. In Halo you break the enemy and they retreat. You have a 'safe' starting territory from which you break out of whenever you kill enough enemies or take out a leader. There is also the shield recharge problem (you need somewhere safe to give cover until you are ready to fight again). So having enemies that rush you and flush you out compromises basic parts of the Halo gameplay mechanic. It is OK now and then for limited sets of enemies but would not be great if it happened all of the time. Berserker Elites would disregard the safe territory rule but fortunately they would be low on health and they would give you fair warning before they berserked. Its not an accident or a lack of programming skill that prevents the NPCs from flushing you out. Its by design. Note that the Flood rushed you and that changed the gameplay rules. Some people didn't like it but I didn't mind that it shook things up a bit. But you are right that we need new gameplay innovations: things that make fighting them more 'difficult'. I just find it hard to think of any. Perhaps they could make better use of dynamic cover. By this I mean that once a vehicle goes up in smoke or once a large enemy drops then the remains can provide cover for NPCs. Normally in Halo the level designers designate parts of the floor as being positions of good cover, the floor is chopped up into invisible tiles. The NPCs then determine which areas of marked cover are appropriate given your position and then they path find to those areas. So it looks like they made sensible decisions for picking cover. Having the AI make those cover decisions for itself is computationally expensive and the problem is compounded if every NPC is constantly updating its estimation of good cover. But it may be possible to run a cover generating algorithm each time a large enemy dies and then cover tiles could be added to the list of available cover for NPCs to make use of. That may be computationally affordable and would make the AI look smarter than the existing AI. They could make sensible use of dynamic cover Though, for all I know, they already do that and I just haven't noticed. :-) I find it hard to think of new attack behaviors. Its always easy to make the game harder: just make the AI super accurate, have them give you no warnings, rush en masse, attack whilst your shields are recharging, rush at you when you sticky them, etc. But those things tend to suck the fun out of the game. Difficult is good but it has to be interestingly difficult, it needs to stretch you and keep you on your toes but not overwhelm you with simple hardness or unfairness. Can anybody think of new behaviors that would make life difficult for the player but in an interesting way? I've been trying to think of ways to have your awareness of the enemies' mental states give you tactical advantages but its hard to think of ways that aren't already used in the original game. I'm sure that if you can get the user to get inside the enemies' minds, if the user can see the benefits then the enemy will appear more intelligent, more like people. Can anybody think of ways that the player can be aware of and exploit the AI's mental states?
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