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by Barrin92 1464 days ago
>because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. was cheating

the F.E.A.R ai is still amazing to me after all these years. I'm surprised by the play tester reaction because even without the broadcasting of intent I think the AI felt very organic. Honestly still one of the most convincing ones to this day in shooters.

https://youtu.be/KQN3yKYkFmE
2 comments
kqr 1464 days ago
It wasn't just about the play tester reaction. Other benefits of broadcasting:

- Sometimes AI characters can't act on their knowledge in a way that is obvious to the player, so they might seem more dumb than they are. The fact that they can vocalise their knowledge even if they can't act on it makes it clear that they are more intelligent than they appear.

- By vocalising their knowledge about the situation, fortuitous incidents will more easily appear like consequences of AI direction, even though they were not actually related. (Narrative bias in the human.)

- Since the AI actually works with a shared mind, it can seem unnatural that each AI character knows what all the others are doing without any voice communication.

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atoav 1464 days ago
> Since the AI actually works with a shared mind, it can seem unnatural that each AI character knows what all the others are doing without any voice communication.

Isn't that an argument for simulation of the type citybound is doing, rather against it? Even the dumbest most "gamified" AIs can have that fault. E.g. think about the enemy AI in Far Cry.

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Aeolun 1464 days ago
I think they just had the AI shout what they were doing right? They didn’t modify the actual behavior.

Of course, shouting ‘Grenade!’ at your enemy gives them plenty of time to get away.

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kqr 1464 days ago
In essence, yes, "the AI" as one whole just shouts out what it is doing. What's sort of neat is that since all AI characters share one mind, they can have one character give orders to another, which then appears to comply – even though it was effectively the character that was going to do the thing that decided to do the thing in the first place. In other words, the "order" is just "the AI" telling itself what it's doing – but it looks to the player as though one AI character instructs another on what to do, and the other obeys.
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Aeolun 1464 days ago
Haha, yeah, I wonder if they at least designated a ‘squad leader’ that was the designated ‘order giver’, or whether it was always a random nearby soldier.

I guess it doesn’t matter from a game perspective since I never noticed, but from a technical perspective it seems more elegant to me.

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