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The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

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Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#21

Post by bigyabai »

tancop wrote: post #11
cgh wrote: post #5

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part…

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 to beg important questions about the game world and the player. Fromsoft characters like Lautrec live in infamy for being so slippery and deliberately misleading.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#22

Post by badsectoracula »

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 "compiled" down to a bytecode VM similar to what some scripting languages use

Though if any of these two approaches makes any difference in performance i'm not sure and i'd expect it'd depend heavily on how exactly they're implemented (my kneejerk reaction would be to expect the VM approach to be faster because parsing a bytecode sequence might be more cache friendly than jumping through pointers, but i also suspect that since game AI scripts/behaviors wont do any real computation themselves and instead 99% of the code would be engine/native calls, any potential benefit would be diminished -- but as i haven't tried to implement the same stuff with a realistic setup using both approaches to compare, i cannot say one or the other for certain).

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#23

Post by bigfishrunning »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #15
gchamonlive wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F.E.A.R. 2 has the best AI that I can think of. Wonder if it counts as high tech or they just squeezed a lot of juice out of basic techniques

F.E.A.R 2 was released on the PS3 and Xbox 360, both of which have laughably low specs by modern standards. When you have to create dynamic experiences out of a potato you are forced to get creative and that involves squeezing a lot of juice out of basic techniques. Transformer based AI had to wait until the world's compute capacity reached a certain level to become feasible.

> Transformer based AI had to wait until the world's compute capacity reached a certain level to become feasible.

It's OK, they'll just keep subsidizing it until it's eventually feasable...

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#24

Post by bitwize »

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.

The logic used to implement game NPCs has been called "AI" since well before the current AI boom. And many of the techniques come from the previous AI boom of the 1970s-1980s.

I know that we're all experiencing AI fatigue, but this comment is an example of the "once an AI technology finds a niche and becomes accepted technique within that niche, it ceases to be AI" meme.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#25

Post by vector_spaces »

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.

There are paradigms of AI that are not deep learning. If you took an AI course in the 90s or earlier, implementations like this are much closer to what you would learn about -- symbolics/GOFAI. It remains basic to some fields where stakes and complexity are high (air traffic control and military systems) but determinism is a strict requirement, not to mention others like gamedev that have lots of performance constraints -- and usually don't actually need or want anything non-deterministic or overly smart.

Deep Blue, the first chess engine to defeat a world champion, was a GOFAI system

There was an article recently about a system used in production at a pasty chain in Japan to classify pastries at checkout that didn't use DL for most of its existence. Now it seems to be a hybrid system that uses symbolics and DL for certain functions

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#26

Post by dgellow »

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

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#27

Post by cgh »

tancop wrote: post #11
cgh wrote: post #5

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part…

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.

Yeah, I’ve been playing these games since DS1 (currently on my umpteenth DS3 run as I recover from surgery). The quests never fail to make me laugh.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#28

Post by vector_spaces »

HawtAds wrote: post #20
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.

> What you're describing is a behavior tree: predefined logic, predefined responses, no learning, no inference, no model. Stop calling everything AI, guys. Depends on how pedantic you want to get, one could argue that regular expressions are AI too. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... Regexes were invented for much higher order tasks (modeling neural networks) than just making find-and-rep…

It's not pedantry at all, there are simply different paradigms of AI. The dominant one today is DL, symbolics/GOFAI were dominant decades ago. These methods are still used today in some fields, not merely gamedev

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#29

Post by tayo42 »

raincole wrote: post #19
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.

FYI, one of the most well-known books about writing game entity behavior is literally called "Programming Game AI by Example." (published in 2004) https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Develope...

Is a book like that still pretty useful? Or is Ai in games abstracted away in game engines pretty much? I've been meaning to play with unreals Ai features a bit.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#30

Post by empath75 »

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.

> 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.

This is literally AI. A behavior tree is AI, all of those things are AI. It's just symbolic rather than neural network based.

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