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Explore innovative AI strategies to enhance NPC behavior in game design, including path planning, learning over time, and adaptation to adversaries. Discuss customization possibilities, such as navigation and group cooperation, for engaging gameplay experiences. Learn how to implement randomness and context-sensitive variations in NPC strategies to create more dynamic gameplay.
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AI in your design docs • Hand-to-hand combat: • Does NPC combatant have AI? • Lemmings: • lemmings have some individual agency and individualized goals/utility function • Do they improve over time? • Old West RPG: • Are there townsfolk or highwaymen NPCs? • Is there a designated ‘ai’ member of each team, or are you thinking about it as a group?
Brainstorming • What intelligent behavior do you like in existing games? • How can you make the game world into a smarter opponent?
Typical AI plan • Add some randomness to NPC strategy • Variation can be context-sensitive or just randomized • Smart path planning/locomotion using waypoints/grabpoints built into the world
AI possibilities • AI techniques used for: • Navigation and route-finding, path planning intelligent hiding • Chat with an NPC • Learn better behavior over time • Adapt to a particular adversary • Infer unobservables, like the adversary’s overall strategy • Cooperation among NPCs, emergent group behaviors like flocking, maneuvers • Planning, goal-directed behavior
Ideas from AI/entertainment • Don’t let the NPCs have perfect knowledge: they have to operate in the environment like the players do • Perhaps they can communicate what they learn
Things to think about • Don’t get in the way of story exposition • How much of a challenge do you want NPCs to present? Should it be as smart as you can make it? • Real AI often slow • Precompute everything: navigation mesh, offline learning