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MechaCrash posted:I think the original Half-Life also used some clever smoke and mirrors to make the enemy soldiers seem smarter than they were by having the entire squad share a pool of actions, like "move to other cover" or "throw grenade," and only one or two members of the squad could be doing that at a time. "Shoot at Gordon" was a free action, so it seemed like they'd try to pin you down with suppressing fire while one or two would move to flank you or flush you out. And really, is that not what they're doing? Designing NPCs with abilities and actions that complement one another, and making sure that they're doing different things at a time, seems like a pretty good way to create rudimentary tactics out of a simple set of actions. It even goes waaaaay back to literal Pac-Man, where the ghosts have different 'personalities' informing their actions; one will aggressively chase you, one will try to cut you off (and likely pincer you in conjunction with the first), one will move around randomly and one will actively avoid you, iirc.
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Nov 20, 2023 11:57
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I think probably AI strategy testing is something that would be great for turn-based games and probably worthless for real-time games because AI tends to break the latter in human-impossible ways. Ideally it would be less used to fully balance the game and more just to identify and eliminate any super degenerate strategies that designers don't want in the game. A good example is the city spam of earlier Civilization games, whether or not you like the strategy it was clearly something Microprose didn't want and would have liked to address it before release if they could.
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Nov 20, 2023 11:58
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Half-Life 1's marine AI is simpler than it looks, but it's carried by good pathfinding and careful level design to emphasize their good bits. There's also some bizarrely obscure AI behavior for the aliens - idle Houndeyes will examine nearby "interesting" things like flashing lights, and might even take naps if they're part of a squad (the leader remains on lookout!). Bullsquads can smell corpses and gibs and elect to eat them instead of you. The Gonarch boss makes sad noises when the baby headcrabs it spawns are killed by the player. All these weird little details you probably won't notice unless you're cheating and invisible.
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Nov 20, 2023 12:08
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That kind of stuff is something that I feel like a lot of games are missing. Enemies that you can approach should never be 100% on alert - give them something to DO. Have them wander around and look at stuff, or be working on something, or even just random idle poses. Left 4 Dead did an amazing job with making the infected feel ALIVE with 4 or 5 random behaviors like being sick or sitting down or getting into a fistfight because they bumped into each other.
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Nov 20, 2023 12:45
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Kith posted:That kind of stuff is something that I feel like a lot of games are missing. Enemies that you can approach should never be 100% on alert - give them something to DO. Have them wander around and look at stuff, or be working on something, or even just random idle poses. Left 4 Dead did an amazing job with making the infected feel ALIVE with 4 or 5 random behaviors like being sick or sitting down or getting into a fistfight because they bumped into each other. Heck, Doom was a downgrade from Wolfenstein 3-D, as monsters in the former couldn't patrol the map and had to be activated by the player's actions.
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Nov 20, 2023 12:55
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The Kins posted:IGN also reports that Embracer has put Gearbox up for sale, but is struggling to find anyone willing to pay what they're asking. This is fuckin' sad. I hope they don't shutter because there is gently caress-all companies to work for out there except iD. Gearbox has some of the best people I know in the industry. But gently caress Randy Pitchford after he took away profit sharing. I'm so fuckin tired of seeing my favorite studios I've worked with directly or indirectly being acquired and run into the ground. I've also never seen so many of my cohorts with 10-15 years of experience being unable to find work. dopesilly fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 15:09
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2k probably wants Gearbox, but nobody wants to pay embracers bloated cost for it so instead it'll go for IP scrap. Along with Deus Ex and more tragically Gex the Gecko
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Nov 20, 2023 15:23
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embracer paid a cool billion for gearbox and got, what, tiny tina's wonderlands out of it?
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Nov 20, 2023 15:27
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Endorph posted:embracer paid a cool billion for gearbox and got, what, tiny tina's wonderlands out of it? And smash hit mega success "New Tales from the Borderlands"
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Nov 20, 2023 15:30
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nah
dopesilly fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Dec 7, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 15:45
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pseudorandom name posted:"AI" is a marketing buzzword for machine learning; people who use AI either don't know what they're talking about or are trying to sell you something, or both. Procedurally generated levels are just human crafted content pasted together in a random order, rather than "truly" procedurally generated from nothing, and without an actual designer designing the blocks you are going to get absolute noisy garbage
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Nov 20, 2023 17:13
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Feldegast42 posted:Procedurally generated levels are just human crafted content pasted together in a random order, rather than "truly" procedurally generated from nothing, and without an actual designer designing the blocks you are going to get absolute noisy garbage Not really, while tile based stuff is popular nowadays, especially for roguelites, a lot of old or traditional roguelikes generate the terrain from scratch with some occasional handmade content, likewise genres like citybuilders use procgen for terrain without massive uses of tiles. Remixing tiles is good for stuff like platformers because it let's you guarantee that the player won't get stuck with a minimal effort compared to checking that algorithmically, but for stuff like dungeoncrawlers that's not really necessary, so full on proc.gen. is fine. , because checking to see if there is a path to the exit is way easier if you don't have to account for stuff like gravity or movement abilities and can just do a flood fill or something.
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Nov 20, 2023 19:11
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Kith posted:That kind of stuff is something that I feel like a lot of games are missing. Enemies that you can approach should never be 100% on alert - give them something to DO. Have them wander around and look at stuff, or be working on something, or even just random idle poses. Left 4 Dead did an amazing job with making the infected feel ALIVE with 4 or 5 random behaviors like being sick or sitting down or getting into a fistfight because they bumped into each other. Bethesda does this pretty well for most of its non-zombie NPCs. Especially their radiant conversations.
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Nov 20, 2023 19:54
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Endorph posted:embracer paid a cool billion for gearbox and got, what, tiny tina's wonderlands out of it? Their publishing arm had some good stuff recently but otherwise lmao
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Nov 20, 2023 20:07
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GameMaker Studio has overhauled its licensing in slightly-belated response to Unity's fumbling by getting rid of all their subscription stuff for non-console development, replacing it with a single lifetime license for commercial development and free access for non-commercial use. Which is pretty great, I was not a fan of the subscription stuff. EDIT: Godot responded on Twitter by asking if they were planning on going open-source, to which they responded with a less-than-cryptic "Stay tuned... 👀". The Kins fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 14:20
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disposablewords posted:I think it was Half-Life 2's AI that Valve admitted was way simpler than it looked because instead of being programmed to do cool maneuvers, instead they pulled tricks like having an enemy call out a "flanking!" bark when it found itself behind you just through the vagaries of pathfinding. Neat stuff happens accidentally and the game pretends it meant to do that all along.
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Nov 21, 2023 23:01
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Endorph posted:also late reply, but the funniest early example of this is probably the original driver, where theyd just spawn cop cars up the road from you and have them floor it straight at you to make it look like they were setting up ambushes and trying to box you in gta 5 does this and it's the worst. yes i have a wanted level but there's no way there's fuckin 3 cop cars just up the road in the middle of the desert gunning it right for me
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Nov 21, 2023 23:14
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That seems like a pretty light deployment against a GTA protagonist
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Nov 21, 2023 23:55
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https://twitter.com/HenshinRX/status/1727853060188238055 This is going to be fun considering AI voices are against union contract.
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Nov 24, 2023 21:11
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ive listened to a few clips and it doesnt seem like AI, it seems like they spliced together old lines and unused takes.
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Nov 24, 2023 21:14
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The new Naruto game is basically spliced together from the last four games with some tiny new content on top so it's probably very likely just recycled together from the past.
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Nov 24, 2023 21:30
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Endorph posted:ive listened to a few clips and it doesnt seem like AI, it seems like they spliced together old lines and unused takes. Yeah, AI voice lacks any sort of emotion, the clips have uh, the wrong emotion for when they're played
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Nov 24, 2023 21:43
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So based on this, while it's probably lovely for the actors it's completely legal for a company to use their likeness without paying them as long as there's no new material recorded? If they're using a Sasuke soundboard then this feels close to loophole abuse but it's not new. It's how you get stuff like the actor who didn't know he was in The Flash.
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Nov 24, 2023 21:48
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SAG contracts typically don’t allow an actor’s voice to be reused across different games. No idea of they were union VAs, but if so they’ve got a case.
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Nov 24, 2023 21:51
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Endorph posted:it worked really well in marvel vs capcom 2 yeah plenty of multiplayer games are egregiously "unbalanced" but still fun. the obsession with spreadsheet numbers tweaking to find optimal balance is mostly a product of wow and games that are taking lessons from it. and wow does this mostly because of dumb decisions that they stick with, like needing to role a new character to play different classes (making balance issues more dire) and insisting on maintaining a ptr (even though ptrs are patently useless at being a balancing aid). the fact that this idea is really widespread while the mvc series still gets a lot of play in fighting game circles should be really telling lol
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Nov 24, 2023 21:55
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mycot posted:So based on this, while it's probably lovely for the actors it's completely legal for a company to use their likeness without paying them as long as there's no new material recorded? If they're using a Sasuke soundboard then this feels close to loophole abuse but it's not new. It's how you get stuff like the actor who didn't know he was in The Flash. Depends entirely on the licensing terms for the audio samples.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:03
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Tiny Timbs posted:There’s a “single player MMO” in the style of EverQuest that does a ton of really impressive simulation of human behavior, like having bots meet you for trades when you announce things in chat. I forget the name but maybe somebody else who caught the post will remember. This isn't the same thing, but the Matrix MMO years ago had real life people play as characters like the Merovingian and would reach out specifically and personally to your guild and give you a meeting point and like 10 minutes to get there to have a lore discussion or a job for you and it was the most awesome loving video game thing ever.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:28
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1glitch0 posted:This isn't the same thing, but the Matrix MMO years ago had real life people play as characters like the Merovingian and would reach out specifically and personally to your guild and give you a meeting point and like 10 minutes to get there to have a lore discussion or a job for you and it was the most awesome loving video game thing ever. Everquest itself used to do lore events in-game with GMs either playing lore figures themselves or deputizing sufficiently trusted players to play those roles on a consistent basis.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:36
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Kanos posted:Everquest itself used to do lore events in-game with GMs either playing lore figures themselves or deputizing sufficiently trusted players to play those roles on a consistent basis. it seems like a relatively cheap way to create excitement in a game. i wonder they they don't do it more often.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:45
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1glitch0 posted:it seems like a relatively cheap way to create excitement in a game. i wonder they they don't do it more often. Because they turn off anyone in the playerbase who can’t be there for it. Why play a game if the cool poo poo is always happening when you’re at work.
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Nov 24, 2023 23:16
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It also doesn't scale very well? If you have an old school mmo with like 100-1000 people online then you can maybe fit them all in one instance and people could have opportunities to RP with the NPC guy but in a game like wow with 500k daily players you'd have to solve some serious logistical problems to even try to do this. And then there would be way too many people for the actor to actually interact with players so you might as well have a pre-recorded pre-scripted event anyways.
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Nov 24, 2023 23:18
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And if you hire a different actor for every server you run into the problem of having to keep track of 50 slightly different versions of the storyline.
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Nov 24, 2023 23:21
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For some reason, my mind now goes to the Fortnite live events. It's similar concept I think - limited time stuff happening in real time all done on the fly sorta. But an event seems easier to plonk in nowadays than the Everquest/Matrix stuff. To add, I do remember one of the new Star Wars rides at Disneyland doing sort of similar stuff with employees as NPCs. So the idea can work, but maybe for like one-off stuff instead of large scale lore.
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Nov 24, 2023 23:31
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:It also doesn't scale very well? If you have an old school mmo with like 100-1000 people online then you can maybe fit them all in one instance and people could have opportunities to RP with the NPC guy but in a game like wow with 500k daily players you'd have to solve some serious logistical problems to even try to do this. And then there would be way too many people for the actor to actually interact with players so you might as well have a pre-recorded pre-scripted event anyways. Also player bias is always a huge issue in things like that. Just as a vaguely similar example; there is a whole genre of player driven RPGs on BYOND, the same engine that Space Station 13 runs on so you have an idea of what kind of jank that poo poo works with, where ostensibly the entire narrative and plot are shaped by the people who play the game and what they do; except every single one that gets popular inevitably comes down to the admins/event runners just favoring whoever they like best which almost always leads to the game just being fragmented groups of friends playing in isolation once they realize that no matter how long they play they'll never get that cool character arc the game promises on the surface because XxSephirothxX is the only guy who ever gets to participate in events and is always the one chosen to talk to the event NPCs, even if he's on a fresh new alt, over anyone else.
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Nov 25, 2023 00:22
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I mean all the reasons to not do it "because some players wouldn't like it" are kind of moot-- I know it's a wild, terrifying concept in the infinite-growth dau-driven landscape but not every game has to be for everyone. I know it's wild to think about "an mmo based in europe has all their cool in-game events based in local time and in the us it's at hours too stupid to be awake for" nowadays But yeah "intimate in-game events" are exponentially more difficult at scale than something like "content moderation" and we've all seen how many companies are trying to cut back on or automate the latter, so... Also before "why not just use AI for it" comes back around as a discussion point, can you imagine the extra support load that would result from an AI NPC being convinced into doing something "unfair" that has to be rolled back, or even just screenshots of an NPC in your MMO being convinced into saying "hahah yeah it is the official opinion of ${company} that the holocaust didn't happen" at a large in game event
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Nov 25, 2023 01:16
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My major memory about EverQuest events, which is probably colored by whatever the opposite of rose colored glasses is, is "the NPC interacts with some people, then a million high level screaming demons are unleashed that slaughter anybody who has any business being in the zone until high level players come by to kill everything and get all the loot." So seeing them go was not a major moment of sadness for me. 
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Nov 25, 2023 01:47
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Person-run ingame events sound really neat until you realize that they'd be run for people like Asmongold to stream to his fanbase
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Nov 25, 2023 01:51
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A roleplaying GM gave me 200 platinum in Everquest when I was a kid and I thought I hit the jackpot 
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Nov 25, 2023 03:08
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For a very brief period Everquest GMs were actual Game Masters. Each server had one that created and ran live events, they even performed ceremonies, like granting characters last names when they reached high enough level. That lasted about two months before the game took off in popularity and it was obviously unsustainable.
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Nov 25, 2023 03:24
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Yeah I'm reminded of all of those Kickstarters for MMOs that bragged about everything being user generated and user run content and stuff without realizing how much of that stuff requires a very specific band of user numbers to make it fun and sustainable
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Nov 25, 2023 03:30
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