I’ve been designing/coding games since I was 11yo and have a degree in gamedesign & dev. The hardest part isn’t the technical side of the game’s AI. It’s finding the balance of an AI that makes the gamer feel powerful enough to be fun- but not too powerful to become bored - and not find it too hard that he/she becomes demotivated. Obviously every player is different so finding a balance that can keep the gamer excited enough to continue is extremely hard. Getting the emotional-experience side of the player into the sweet zone is hard. One would say ‘why not make the AI such that it adapts to the user’. Which is 50% of the answer. But the challenge then becomes that you don’t want good players to be at the same level as bad players when the AI creates a similar experience for both. You want both players to enjoy the game, but not in the same way.
Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think there is a class of players who don't want to feel clever for outsmarting a predictable AI?
All players want to win. The level of difficulty is equal to the level of accomplishment, but games have to be made for the average rather than the exceptional, so many better than average players won't be challenged by the difficulty. Nobody is going to invest the resources into a real AI just for the hardest difficulty modes. If it cannot be used on Easy/Normal, it simply isn't happening.
How does that fit into games like Dwarf Fortress where "fun" is in losing? Does winning count as achieving whatever goals the players set for themselves before reaching game-over?
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#43I’d love to do this as a career or sell Premade AI modules for games. Any ideas?
Would game developers consider contracting out the AI to a freelancer?
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please... head over to Paradox Interactive and seek to join their team if you're bummed out to a point of thinking that. (And you're welcome to link to this comment in your application.) Their audience is basically desperate for a better AI that does better strategic and tactical thinking rather than pathfinding, weighted decision trees, and a couple of high level heuristics. Here's what I and I'd gather many others…
I'm not much of a chess player, but one thing I've wondered is whether the games against Chess AIs are interesting for good players. Do they feel exciting as though you were playing against a similarly skilled human player? And can you distinguish between an AI and a similarly skilled player very easily?
The thing with Chess (or Go) is that unless you've a club in your area or a skilled relative, you're playing alone against an AI or playing online.
It's of course much more exciting to play against skilled human players. In particular your parents or your childhood friends while growing up. But unless you're living in some large city you might not find many other offline options after you start beating all of them.
That leaves you with a choice between going "pro" to some degree or another, playing online against other people, and playing against an AI (online or not). I'm honestly at a loss to give you an unbiased view of which is most interesting, since I've seldom found the time to play Chess in the past decade or two. What I do know though is that no bot gives you good social interactions.
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#45Game AI is mostly pathfinding (which basically falls down to creating navigation meshes for levels), and very basic decision making skills, which is usually a weighted decision tree (e.g. if they're getting shot at, cover might be weighted at 80%, shooting back at 20%). You don't want to actually create something actually smart to fight, you want something with understandable, predictable logic for the player and som…
Please... head over to Paradox Interactive and seek to join their team if you're bummed out to a point of thinking that. (And you're welcome to link to this comment in your application.) Their audience is basically desperate for a better AI that does better strategic and tactical thinking rather than pathfinding, weighted decision trees, and a couple of high level heuristics. Here's what I and I'd gather many others…
My understanding of the latest-gen Pdox games is that parts of the AI are shared at the level of the Clausewitz engine, and that Clausewitz in turn was developed for EU3, but designed as an extremely general engine for 2D games, not even just GSGs. So in some ways the HOI4 AI, for instance, is using techniques that might have worked great for EU3 (and, in my experience, worked fairly well in Victoria II, if you treat the economy separately), but are now unsuitable.
I'm interested as to whether they've improved the AI in Imperator - not that I'm going to buy it - as the Jomini sub-engine was supposed to streamline a lot of the "cruft" that had built up between 2007 and now.
As to your point RE: OPMs going on world conquests, I think that's part of Paradox's cross-franchise decision to move away from historicality and towards more "casual" gameplay (i.e., map painting), not just between EU3 - 4 but HOI3 - 4 as well; and ultimately has more to do with their balance choices for the player than the strength of the AI.
I do think that, as it stands, HOI4 and EU4 are at the same level as certain competitive games, where instead of trying to play historically, many players just wait for the next patch's balancing to over-correct in favour of some set of poor AI choices, and possibly for Reman's Paradox to explain it to them, and then exploit that to their advantage. Making the AI more competent, and removing the need for balancing and overcorrecting, would remove that perceived ability to exploit a broken enemy, and thus some of the desire from the playerbase for map-painting over historical accuracy.
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious if your friend's project is open-source at all, would love to see the implementation details of this?
It isn't open source, but you can still play it if you have Flash installed: http://www.kongregate.com/games/thegrandestine/chess-evolved... Imagine chess but with 100+ different pieces and an element of collecting/upgrading pieces.
Cool, thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#47Game AI is mostly pathfinding (which basically falls down to creating navigation meshes for levels), and very basic decision making skills, which is usually a weighted decision tree (e.g. if they're getting shot at, cover might be weighted at 80%, shooting back at 20%). You don't want to actually create something actually smart to fight, you want something with understandable, predictable logic for the player and som…
That reminds me of a lesson developer's learned when making a stealth game, Splinter Cell. Originally, when you were spotted the enemies would just try to shoot you, but tester feedback said that players didn't like getting shot out of nowhere. The devs added audible cues that you'd been found, like the guard yelling "Hey you!" before they started shooting. It turns out realistic AI behaviors aren't necessarily fun A…
Gaming is full of tricks - e.g. I liked how Bioshock developers said that they made enemies deliberately miss their first shot so the player has time to react.
Or how many shooters lower incoming damage and increase outgoing damage as you come close to dying to create those "I survived with 1HP left!" moments.
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please... head over to Paradox Interactive and seek to join their team if you're bummed out to a point of thinking that. (And you're welcome to link to this comment in your application.) Their audience is basically desperate for a better AI that does better strategic and tactical thinking rather than pathfinding, weighted decision trees, and a couple of high level heuristics. Here's what I and I'd gather many others…
My understanding of the latest-gen Pdox games is that parts of the AI are shared at the level of the Clausewitz engine, and that Clausewitz in turn was developed for EU3 , but designed as an extremely general engine for 2D games, not even just GSGs. So in some ways the HOI4 AI, for instance, is using techniques that might have worked great for EU3 (and, in my experience, worked fairly well in Victoria II, if you trea…
> As to your point RE: OPMs going on world conquests, I think that's part of Paradox's cross-franchise decision to move away from historicality and towards more "casual" gameplay (i.e., map painting)
TBH I'm actually fine with that, so long as the AI can end up doing the same. I'm still waiting for an AI Ulm to vassalize large chunks of the HRE and become emperor.
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the game. The entire genre of strategy games could probably benefit from smarter AI. More so for 4X style games. Mostly, the current AIs act like players, but make terribly inefficient decisions that get 'balanced' at various difficulty levels by throwing more resources at them or other advantages. So the games vary between being absurdly easy, to being difficult simply because the AI cheats, and even then…
TA:Spring had these AIs that would exploit shit in a terribly annoying way. Like, you had ballistic projectiles that would take a while to arrive at the target, and your units would fire them. Well, the enemies had them too, except the AI would exploit its superior micro by firing off the projectiles at maximum range and maximum inbound velocity and then immediately shifting outbound. You can't move your bloody units…
Which Spring AI was this? I don't remember any of them being any good.
I made a Spring AI back in the day (it wasn't very good either).
Re: Ask HN: Game devs, what is the hardest part about designing an AI for your game?
#50I actually think there would be value in having machine-learning / AI in a game that would dynamically try to match the human player's skill without overwhelming the human player. The goal would be to maintain parity such that the human's player response would always be "I was this close, and I could have done X, Y, and Z" as opposed to "I had no chance".