| iamacyborg | 03-03-2010 03:02 PM |
More Love on RPS
RPS have just published another article that mentions Eskil Steenberg. This one's an old piece that first appeared in PC Gamer UK about GDC '08. Written by Jim Rossignol. Quote:
The crucial issue here, as Swedish coding-mastermind Eskil Steenberg points out, is that AI can be asked do a lot of things that that people cannot, or will not. “You can’t get people to play all the boring parts in a game like guard #324,” says Steenberg. “But what you can do is to have the game makers record what the guard should do. The obvious problem with this is that the recorded actions of the guard cant react to anything unusual the player does. The solution is to program an artificial intelligence, that can control the guard and that can react to what the player does. The smarter the program is, and the more things it takes in to account, the better the experience will be for the player.” Artificial intelligence, and not pure power/bandwidth muscle, is where the true germ of our gaming future will lie.
This seems obvious: elements of artificial intelligence are popping up everywhere in games, from enemies in Halo to your neighbours in The Sims. But Steenberg takes it further. If artificial intelligence can bring characters to life, why can’t it start bringing the rest of the game to life? “If we look at other things in games, like story, levels, characters, events, cinematics, conversations they are all provided on the disc,” says Steenberg. “They have the same limitations of the guard with the recorded actions, they cant react to what the players do. The two solutions would be to either have people making all the content while you are playing the game (something that is impossible to do fast enough), or just like in the case of the guard, you write a little program that does it for you.” And, to a small degree, we’re already seeing that happen with Left 4 Dead’s director. In the sequel, it will even change the layouts of the levels. It’s also happening in Steenberg’s own game, where the AI settlements make war on the player-constructed outposts.
“Procedural content is not random content,” says Steenberg. “Just like the AI actions on the AI guard aren’t random. It follows a set of carefully set up rules that governs its actions. The more things you take in to account the better the content gets. We are seeing some nudging in this direction: destructible environments, ragdolls, physics, and AI directors. All these technologies remove the need for canned content and replace it with a bit of code.” Eventually, perhaps, games will be building themselves ahead of us, responding to us with intelligence, with creativity. Whole systems that are generated by our actions. They won’t be static, nor any more predictable than the real world. (The butterfly effect becomes a game-design principle.)
“Ultimately,” says Steenberg, “we can replace more and more of our game content with code, and we will get more and more flexible games that can react to the player in entirely new ways.” For this far-sighted Swedish developer, what is exciting is not new hardware, but software solutions devised for the hardware we already have. “I would argue that technology has digressed gaming,” says Steenberg. “The higher you put the bar, especially for graphics, the more you sacrifice in gameplay. In a 2D block based game like Super Mario Bros, implementing destructibility is easy, while in a modern 3D game it is hard so most people don’t bother. Another example is AI. Halo 3, had to scale down their AI for Halo 2 because the added graphics made it impossible to have the same number of visibility tests and path finding tests. In a text adventure it was easy to let the player chose his or her own name and then have it be pasted in to all the dialog, in a “modern” game with recorded voice, you simply can’t do that.”
| Read the full article over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. |
