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Next-gen could make it easier for AI programmers to create more complex games.

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

“The next evolution of AI is going to be crowd AI,” Square Enix lead AI researcher Youichiro Miyake tells me, via translator Ben Judd. “Before, it was smart objects forcing different actions on the characters, where next it’s going to be territories that you’ll designate as AI that will force different actions on the characters.

“In the ‘80s, the classic version would be this cable that would dictate actions on the players or the NPCs, but now it would be an area that would do that. It’s more about trying to be efficient with your processing power.

“The classic style of AI would set up multiple smart objects, a character would go in and it would know all the smart objects – then you could have really detailed, interesting AI, but it comes at a heavy processing cost. With crowd AI, you dictate an area, and then without having to use a lot of processing power, a character goes into that area and has different instructions or dictations that affect them. It’s not about being larger, it’s about being more efficient.”

“But still, as a programmer, you’ll still need to have smart AI programming and there will be certain limitations based on chipset and other factors,” Miyake explains.

“Another piece of the future of AI is obviously going to be machine learning coming in. You’re going to see more and more AI that reacts to a player’s playstyle, to their personality. Are they a good gamer, a bad gamer, do they tend to go into combat, or are they exploratory? We’re going to analyse those patterns and then the character AI will largely have a lot of automation, analysing these patterns and dynamically adjusting to that playstyle.

“However, a lot of the evolution of AI is going to come in the meta AI level, which will be controlled by the programmers who are basically the gods of the game. So them defining the overall rulesets of the game, but within it there’s pocket-sized machine learning-based AI – that’s probably the new thing we’re going to see with AI evolution.”
 

ZywyPL

Banned
I see it the other way around - the more complex the system is, the harder the programming gets (until you have specialized engine and tool for that particular system of course). Seeing how the development time went from 2-3 years to 4-5 in this generation, I'm really sceptical. However, I am fully aware the development will be able to use the current PS4/XB2 engines for moderate results, and modify them down the road to squeeze more performance as the years fly by.
 

Meh3D

Member
“Another piece of the future of AI is obviously going to be machine learning coming in. You’re going to see more and more AI that reacts to a player’s playstyle, to their personality. Are they a good gamer, a bad gamer, do they tend to go into combat, or are they exploratory? We’re going to analyse those patterns and then the character AI will largely have a lot of automation, analysing these patterns and dynamically adjusting to that playstyle.

This is quite vague. What is criteria for being a "good gamer"/"bad gamer." Are they referring to someone's skill level? Someone who follows the path and/or actions the game designer's intended? Someone who goes by/attempts to break the game world's rules? Kind of sounds big brother-ish if you think about it from some perspectives.
 

nani17

are in a big trouble
I'm tired of AI stupid like Far Cry 5 as an example. In Far Cry NPCs would be in good cover only to leave it and crouch shoot in the open. They're also blind and deaf to you at times.

So like anyone would I turned up the difficulty but like most games these days doing this doesn't make the AI smarter. You just take double the damage.

Is this is either lazy development or we're just restricted by our technology?
 
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