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Chris Heckerspyparty.com
…plus some ranting.
SpyPartyA Game About AI…
What is SpyParty?
Less of this......more of this.
demo
SpyParty Aesthetic Goals
perception vs. deception & performance
attention as a resource
consequential decisions with partial information
deduction vs. intuition
analysis paralysis vs. extinct by instinct
extreme asymmetry
Mechanicscomplete focus on player skill
map navigation
aiming & shooting
micro
combat strategy
behavior perception
subtle performance
playing it cool
social pattern matching
고수
These Mechanics Have Ramifications
If we want “performing NPC behavior” to be a
player-skill……NPCs and the Spy should share the same behavior
systems.
…we are forced into certain types of
technical solutions.
Pathing
Spy controls feed into pathfinder
Click-to-move vs. analog control?
Inverse Kinematics
Spy will not align properly, so NPCs must not either
Auto-docking?
Inverse Kinematics
Almost nobody works on this stuff.
Situations
simultaneous layered affordances
Situations
Spy situations and affordances ‘inherit’ from NPC’s
Situations
Spy tracks same state as NPC in a situation
Situations AI System
• really not that much to learn here (yet?)
• sort of like Sims interactions, but simultaneous, layered, resource-based
• easy to code, one situation per file
• bottom out as C switch() statement and enum states, Spy handled with if()s
• talks to lower level animation system
Two Open [Solvable] Problems
The Outro Problem
The AIAnim Problem
Disclaimer: I may be the only one who thinks these are unsolved.
The Outro Problem
Who is responsible for the outro?
The Outro Problem
Intros are (relatively) trivial.
intro
body
The Outro Problem
Outros are a disaster.
WTF?
bodystimuli
WTF?
The Outro Problem
A lot of systems just punt, and hope the
animation state machine and/or
blender will fix the problem, or just
ignore latency and correctness.
This will never result in high
quality behavior and movement.
The AIAnim Problem
How and what do the AI and
Animation systems communicate?similar but not identical states
wide bidirectional interface
combinatorics are deadly
proceduralism can’t compete on quality
The AIAnim Problem
I do not think the solution looks like this:
I think both the Outro Problem and the
AIAnim Problem have a common root
cause:
Interesting things happen over time.
Computers and programming languages are not good at dealing with things that happen
over time.
Auto-docking?Click-to-move vs. analog
control?
These are game design questions.
AI programming is game design.
The lack of recognition of this fact, and the
failure to embrace it, explains why most AI research has not had
an impact on the game industry.
graphics, networking, algorithms, signal processing…
Games are the aesthetics of interactive systems.
Frank Lantz
Aesthetics is the opposite of science.
AIGame Design
Games
Aesthetics
You are hosed.
By ‘you’, I mean anyone who tries to do work in
game AI without doing the game design part.By ‘doing the game design part’, I mean
actually making compelling games.
Doing AI without making games is
like writing graphics code but never rendering
an image.
Work on highly leveraged & relevant problems, right at the edge of your ability to
solve them, and then really “test the solutions”.
AI is the future of games.
Step up to the plate.
