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The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

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Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#91

Post by flohofwoe »

eska wrote: post #49
evanjrowley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Such a hierarchcal AI is how most RTS games work, and also the famous Falcon 4 campaign system which could simulate a realistic modern war scenario on the Korean peninsula in realtime down to individual units (although collapsed into higher level 'group AIs' when far away from the player) and all that on a 1998 PC!

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#93

Post by [deleted] »

cgh wrote: post #27
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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#94

Post by rootlocus »

xdertz wrote: post #83
rootlocus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.

> LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I disagree. Hardcoded means you need to change and recompile the entire program. So neither an .env file nor model weights that are loaded at runtime are 'hardcoded'.

Sure, and the article mentions the AI in elden ring is scripted in lua which is loaded at runtime, meaning it's not hardcoded.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#95

Post by jawilson2 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #76
pitkali wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the speedrunners just kill the guy in the jar to get the medallion: you don't have to talk to him. Also, all you have to do in the Snowfield is to take a teleporter: that's not very secret, is it?

It's not secret, but it's not exactly easy; you can find one part of the medallion just by exploring (iirc its description says what it's for), but not sure if the second half is that straightforward. And even then, while an item may say "use it here", if it's been dozens of hours since you got it you may just straight up forget about it. That said, I think that the target audience for the DLC was always people who t…

> That said, I think that the target audience for the DLC was always people who thoroughly played through the game.

That's true, but it is strange that you get there and get early-game upgrade materials, like Smithing Stone 2, etc. It seems like they wanted to emphasize that the Scadutree Fragments are the important things for scaling, and not your Base Game level, but you already have to be pretty high level and upgraded to beat Mohg.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#96

Post by animal531 »

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…

Roughly speaking FSM + stack based approaches are perfectly fine for 100 entities, but not for 1k.

Once you get to that point you can still make it work but it will take a lot of work to make it as fast as possible, whereas you'd have been better served by more branchless approaches that doesn't parse/jump the FSM.

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#97

Post by [deleted] »

killingtime74 wrote: post #62
Rendello wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crypto is not short for cryptography though in that context, it's cryptocurrency?

[deleted]

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#98

Post by Rendello »

sph wrote: post #79
killingtime74 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is not short for cryptography though in that context, it's cryptocurrency?

Different meanings in closely related contexts is exactly the point of OP and GP. If you search for 'rust crypto', you get results for Rust cryptographic packages as well as Rust in the cryptocurrency space (as it's become very popular with that audience) Same with googling 'game dev AI', as I've been doing to learn about behaviour trees/FSM, you get inundated by articles of people with a Claude subscription and a dr…

Exactly, "crypto" has been hacker jargon for cryptography and its implementations for a long time [a][b]. Since cryptocurrency appeared (and went mainstream), that original jargon has been awash in the tide.

a. Like on /r/crypto: https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/

b. "Don't roll your own crypto(graphy)!" is/was a popular hacker slogan: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#99

Post by Rendello »

hbn wrote: post #92
raincole wrote: post #7

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

Probably not as annoying as what guys named Al are going through

Ai 愛 is a common Japanese name, too. Though I suppose the lowercase 'i' is easier to distinguish than the lowercase 'l'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_(given_name)

Re: The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

#100

Post by munificent »

rootlocus wrote: post #69
munificent wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-game dev, I always found it a little annoying that they used "AI" for what was essentially just hard-coded logic. It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were u…

LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.

There's no reasonable definition of "hard-coded" that fits how LLMs are made.

The whole idea behind "hard-coded" and original symbolic AI was that a skilled human deliberately wrote explicit code to define a program's behavior.

Machine learning is the exact opposite of that approach.

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