The mind behind a game

Why does AI stink?

Published on May 6, 2009 By Sanguiniusnz In PC Gaming

That invisible but pervasive element of a computer game that is the AI. The pivotal component that makes or breaks the single player experience.

Given it's supposed to be artificial intelligence why is it mostly dumb as a tree stump? Many games I have played the AI will barely make me break a sweat (I only consider myself to be a moderatly decent player) unless the designers have taken the easy way out and programmed the harder AI options to "cheat"

For those of you familiar with any kind of game you will have at some point played against an NPC (non player character) opponent, from Star Craft to Half Life, World of Warcraft to Neverwinter Nights 2. There are very few instances where a game does not include some form of NPC and having NPC's means needing an AI to control them.

The problem is AI's all seem to rely on very basic scripted events, if X happens do Z. This was fine back in the days of the original Starcraft and Total Annihilation but why hasn't it evolved? Is it that difficult for developers to program in an AI that can challenge there players without resorting to "cheating"? FPS games have probably evolved more than any other due to the "immersion" factor that many of them are reliant on, if you have stupid AI doing stupid things most people will consider it a stupid game, especially in games such as Crysis where having intelligent NPCs was part of the game, enemy forces would back each other up flank and radio for assistance.

One genre that is quite possibly my favourite game type but also seems to be the one that has lagged behind more than anything is RTS. Game developers seem to be locked in this state that instead of making the AI smarter, use its units better and generally make more intelligent decisions we will just give them a much higher resource income and allow them to overwhelm the player with more units than you can possibly handle.

Now while we obviously don't want AI of the level that can take over your computer and start a robot revolution we do want AI that challenges us. Once the campaign is done all we have left is skirmish or multiplayer. While a lot of people tout MP as the best thing about games I honestly disagree. I have no statistics to back me up but I would hazard a guess and say that possibly only 20% a games player base ever venture online the rest either don't have a decent internet connection or have no interest in the cutthroat world of online gaming. That would mean that 80% of the player base are left playing against an AI that is about as smart as their shoe size and relies on various methods of "cheating" in order to provide a challenge. Do they even program the AI to win would be another interesting idea.

AI already has an advantage over any human player by its capacity to move and utilise unit abilites faster than we ever could, given this massive advantage why is it designers have to make it "cheat" to provide us with a callenge?

I'm going to use Dawn of War 2 as a quick example. Anyone who has played this game knows how terrible the AI is, it rarely caps the victory points, rarely pushes you off captured victory points, doesn't harass power generators and seems to just play a game of whack a mole with capture points (while ignoring vp's). I honestly don't know how hard it would be to program an AI in this game to think "my opponent has all 3 vp's I need to at the least knock him off 2 points and capture them in order to win" or to even recognise the importance of said points.

Another example taken from Supreme Commander. Play a sea based map and you will find your opponent will have made a large amount of ground troops that do nothing but mill around on the beach. Again how difficult would it have been to have the AI recognise that this is a sea map and to only make amphibious units or if it was going to make land based units make ones that are useful for repelling sea and air attacks.

Will the day ever dawn where I can force a computer opponent to abandon an attack on my base when I fake an assault his base and then ambush his forces? Hopefully one day but I feel the gaming industry as a whole needs to invest more time into their game AI instead of keeping to the same tried and tested way of inserting a tree stump for an AI and giving it more money than the player.

Comments

lambdaman

on May 06, 2009

quoting post

Is it that difficult for developers to program in an AI that can challenge there players without resorting to "cheating"?

Yes. Here's an example.

It took something like thirty years for chess programs to get good enough to compete with decent human players. Admittedly some of that was hardware, but some of it was also software improvements. And chess is essentially the idea case: it requires a whole lot of what humans are bad at and computers are good at (precise calculation) and less of what humans are good at and computers are bad at (situational awareness, pattern recognition, etc). And even there, the things humans are good at can almost be used to overcome our handicaps when it comes to abstract logic.

Now consider Go. Go is a game whose rules are even simpler than chess at first glance, AI experts have been trying to solve it for years, and I've heard that the best Go software can be beaten by even the weakest human players once they know a little bit about the game. Apparently, in Go, pattern recognition is much more important than calculating ten moves ahead.

Most computer games don't require a lot of precise calculation, because they're made to be sold, people buy them because they like them, and most people don't like to spend a lot of time doing precise calculation, because we're bad at it. So computer games are more or less by definition going to be hard for a computer to play at a level that competes with humans.

Gh0st_Note-

on May 06, 2009

If you would like to see some excellent AI in action that does not cheat, play Galactic Civilization 2. Very impressive AI at harder levels. I'm not saying it's the greatest or that it doesn't have any kind of flaw, but from my experience, the AI continually challenges you and demands you to think to win. Give it a shot, and just in case you somehow don't know, it is developed by Stardock.

XSive_Death

on May 06, 2009

I'm a MUDer, trying to react to 75+ lines scrolling on the screen each second is very difficult (nigh on impossile) so to compensate for this we use healing systems (series of triggers, variables etc) which do the reactions for us. The problem is you are fighting against other people who don't react in the same ways to similar situations. Even a simple game like a MUD requires upwards of 10k lines of code just to "heal" automated afflictions and states, never mind factor in and predict an opponents actions. It requires an intuitive ability.

What i would like to see in future from Game AI's is a "memory" of sorts. Storing a players profile along with typical data (what units they prefer on what maps, are they a turtler etc) so the AI evolves over time much like people do who play each other, adapting to situations.

At the end of the day a computer is just a series of Logic gates, its the reason a computers random function is never actually random and the reason we will never see "true" AI until the advent of bio/quantum-computers.

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