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The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

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Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#31

Post by badprose »

bigyabai wrote: post #21
tancop wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

Especially in Elden Ring, it also contributes to the ludonarrative cohesion. Hyetta's quest (no spoilers!) isn't meant to be completed by everyone, her story is a foil to Melina's "default" questline that is mandatory for beating the game. Other characters (eg. Boc, Sellen, Selivus, Thops) also have quests that are easy to start but deliberately obfuscated towards the end. The JRPG logic is annoying, but From uses it…

They're victims of success. Lautrec was so infamous some people (read: me) are too scared to play the game without a guide now. "What if I missed some NPC and I can't level up anymore?!"

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#32

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

badsectoracula wrote: post #22

The article keeps on mentioning about the performance issues of the decision tree that somehow this approach avoids, but it doesn't seem to actually put any real detais about the why here. Especially considering that: 1. Many scripting languages you'd find in games are implemented by evaluating the syntax tree directly (IIRC WitcherScript in Witcher 2 and 3 is implemented like that) 2. A behavior tree can be "compile…

How big are these trees that performance starts to matter?

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#33

Post by BearOso »

rambojohnson wrote: post #17

What do you mean by "low-tech AI"? This isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network. What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model. Stop calling everything AI, guys.

You do realize that an LLM is an enormous decision tree? The prompt is the state and output tokens added to that are the subsequent state that's fed back into the machine. Running the math without deliberately adding any randomness would produce a deterministic output.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#34

Post by herodoturtle »

dgellow wrote: post #26
rambojohnson wrote: post #17

What do you mean by "low-tech AI"? This isn't AI...It's a behavior tree. Calling every decision-making system "AI" is like calling a flowchart a neural network. What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model. Stop calling everything AI, guys.

That was called AI before the current LLM-AI era. Your comment reads like someone complaining that cryptography is called crypto

Came here to say this.

And I suspect that one day we might even think of LLMs as "low tech AI", assuming we move on to more advanced forms of AI (here's hoping).

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#35

Post by 8note »

this gets very clear when you look at the wiki on how different bosses move and how the different boss combos lead from one into another

and of course, lets you have a reasonable amount of control over different bosses

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#37

Post by andrewflnr »

drunken_thor wrote: post #2

This is behaviour trees. What you’re describing is behaviour trees. Edit: I see later you say it isn’t a behaviour tree but this is how a lot of BTs are implemented. They don’t always loop from the root. A lot of the time according to state the root is redefined off of a branch and that sub tree is looped until going further down the tree or even into a different tree. Much like the stack you are describing.

There's definitely a strong shared flavor between this and behavior trees. Almost like a goal stack in this system is a continuation or call-stack of a behavior-tree traversal-in-progress.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#38

Post by SerpentJoe »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #13
tancop wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

Just to underline your point, Sekiro's NPCs behave in a much more obvious and linear way relative to From's other games, so it's clearly a game design decision and not a technical one.

I would agree, but there are still some interactions that require doing the same thing repeatedly in order to make progress (eating rice balls, eavesdropping).

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#39

Post by pnt12 »

evanjrowley wrote: post #4
tokai wrote: post #3

Low tech AI? Its sounds like standard game AI. I would really like to hear what the author would deem high tech game AI.

I know very little about AI and game mechanics, but knowing how early Fromsoft games were (e.g., Kingsfield), a basic AI in Elden Ring is very unsurprising. That's not necessarily a bad thing! My vote for "high tech game AI" would probably be this old mod for Fallout 4: >PANPC (Pack Attack NPC Edition) is a unique scripted AI management system for Fallout 4. Rather than treating each enemy as an individual proximity-…

FromSoftware really puts design first, so it doesn't surprise me they use a classic AI and then leave it up to the designers to craft memorable experiences.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#40

Post by Terr_ »

raincole wrote: post #7

As a game dev, the fact "AI" as a keyword became totally unusable is quite annoying.

I try to say "LLM" as much as possible, but I'm aware that it's unlikely to work.

Partly for technical accuracy, partly to manage the average person's expectations when they hear "AI", partly to avoid contributing to a big dumb-money "everything is AI" bubble, etc.

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