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Mortal-Region t1_jeaia9q wrote

>We aren’t making clear progress in game character AI like other stuff, and we need a proper leap.

Problem is, it's such a huge leap going from decision trees to autonomous agents who can form their own objectives and plans with respect to other characters and the environment. It's pretty much the same problem that brains evolved for. LLMs aren't agents, so I think they'll end up as automated dialogue generators, with the overall storyline still being "on rails".

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ReignOfKaos t1_jebvoyd wrote

In theory, reinforcement learning could solve this, but specifying the reward function is very hard and if you need human evaluation then it is very slow. I think it’s not quite as theoretical of a solution as evolutionary algorithms, as it’s been successfully applied to create very capable game playing agents before, but I think it’s very difficult to beat behavior trees or simple utility systems when it comes to creating characters that are fun to play with.

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[deleted] t1_jecp7fs wrote

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FoniksMunkee t1_jed4er2 wrote

So it's a hybrid approach?

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[deleted] t1_jed7r25 wrote

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FoniksMunkee t1_jedcqe9 wrote

It's interesting - I work in AAA games and work with a lot of clients. They are deathly silent on any kind of AI integration so far. So it will be interesting to see when this starts coming down the pipe.

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[deleted] t1_jedeic5 wrote

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FoniksMunkee t1_jediwl9 wrote

Yes, that's a good point I didn't think of is API costs.

The other issue is games kinda move slowly in some respects. There are games that started before ChatGPT was commonly known that wont be finished until after ChatGPT 5 is out. And there is no way these tools will be integrated during that process.

They would also have to convince Sony, MS and Nintendo to have their SDK's in a model. I don't think MS will necessarily have a problem with that... but there's a ton of third party libraries that would need to come on board, not to mention how you deal with existing legacy code. There are still more companies in the AAA industry with custom engines than are using commercial engines like UE4/UE5.

Then comes the RND, then comes the new game... so what, 5 years before we see wide spread adoption in the AAA market?

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[deleted] t1_jedlka4 wrote

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FoniksMunkee t1_jedm0mj wrote

There will be teams that are starting games today - that might look at ways of using it. I Know of some teams using it for art pipelines (but mostly inspiration / mood boards). And there will be some tools like Photoshop and Blender etc that will mean we will see it appear in the pipelines earlier.

But as far as wide spread penetration - it will probably need to wait for teams to start new projects. So obviously, a team starting today may choose to do something already. But widespread use? It's way too risky. It's hard enough to justify an upgrade from UE4.27 to UE5.1. I can't imagine up-ending an entire gameplay system just to integrate AI would be an easy sell.

And while I won't be the first to know when it starts happening... I will be early on because of where I sit in the pipeline. All I hear right now is crickets.

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azriel777 t1_jed9mfh wrote

Some combo system. The NPC's are like skyrim, on rails with some randomness so it gives the illusion of being alive, but when the user interacts with them, the AI takes over and fleshes them out to give them life and when you leave them they revert back to what they were, perhaps with some modifications to their rules and behavior depending on what the user did. The AI could also randomly take over NPC's to generate interesting things for the user to see or generate quests for the user. The potential is there, just going to take some trial and error to figure out what works and doesn't.

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