Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

nega.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 101 posts

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#41

Post by Terr_ »

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

Or someone that believes "phones" are, by definition, things with a touchscreen.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#42

Post by jiggawatts »

Terr_ wrote: post #40
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.

I call it "mechanised coding".

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#43

Post by guizzy »

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.

And even before King's Field, this is just the way games used to be like. Games couldn't elaborate too much, so your options were:

a) you lucked out and it turns out your brain works exactly like the designer's and the cryptic hint make sense to you,

b) you use a guide/ask a friend/call a hotline,

c) you like the game so much you end up brute forcing your way through all of that stuff,

d) you just ignore that sidequest. I sure hope for you that finishing the main quest doesn't need you to guess something unreasonably obtuse... *COUGH* Legend of Zelda's final dungeon's location *COUGH*

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#44

Post by dvngnt_ »

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…

It made more sense in Demon's Souls where the game was more linear so you'll more likely to encounter the NPC without a guide.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#45

Post by nitwit005 »

The high level might look simple, but something like "attack" has to involve checking if it's possible/reasonable in a 3D space, animating turning and walking prior to the attack, playing the animations, dealing with player block or parry, etc.

Any good library author is going to try to bury the complexity so that users don't need to deal with it, but there can be a monstrous beast under the hood.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#46

Post by Rendello »

raincole wrote: post #7

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

The same thing happened with crypto (cryptography) after Bitcoin blew up, though it was just an abbreviation so it wasn't as bad.

There's no ambiguity when speaking, but when searching Rust-related things I get a lot of Rust game stuff. "Rust crates" or "Rust drops" correspond to in-game things so the fandom wiki will pop up. Occasionally I'll even get rust-removal webpages.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#47

Post by Rendello »

vector_spaces wrote: post #28
HawtAds wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If it would have been (will be?) destroyed during the Butlerian Jihad, it's AI!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jih...

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#48

Post by Rendello »

Terr_ wrote: post #40
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.

Or "gen(erative) AI". I must admit that as soon as I saw AI in the title, I lost interest until I realized it was classic AI. The term seems so far gone now but we don't have a good classifier for the non-gen-ai yet.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#49

Post by eska »

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-…

That is still simple AI and commonly used.

1. Make individual agent AIs that can act on their own.

2. Make squad AIs that can influence their agent AIs.

3. Add even more AIs on top, like a scenario AI.

Each of these AIs can be a state machine, behavior tree, rule system or goal system. They’re exactly equivalent and can be translated into each other mechanically. So the whole hierarchical AI is equivalent to one big state machine.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#50

Post by H1Supreme »

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…

When I finally started using the internet to figure out what I'm supposed to do next on some of the quests, I couldn't believe how many of the answers were "Talk to the NPC three times in a row to exhaust their dialogue".

Like, are you shitting me? Why? After a while, I would do this to every NPC, every time. But, yeah, it's a bad design.

Post reply on HN