@Satoru said:
I think people really sort of underestimate the work that needs to go into AI and why AI in games is so fundamentally difficult
AI is complicated. I mean sure we have machines that can play Go and chess. But you might have noticed those computers are basically the size of an apartment complex. They’re also in turn based games where if hte AI takes 1-2 minutes per turn that isn’t considered ‘omg why is this taking so long’. they’re also 1v1 games as opposed to 1 vs many. With 1 vs many you run into again ‘why is this computer taking so long’ problems.
AI finalization timelines. So while you’re working on the overall framework of the AI, note that actually filling that brain with data is hard. The other part is that with game development, lots of things aren’t done until like the very end. So 1 month before you are to ship, you might be waiting for some giant thing to get implemented. Not to mention all the ongoing ‘balance tweaking’ which can cause your AI to have a seizure or to act dumb because it hasn’t taken into account how archers were nerfed in the latest build.
Your brain does a lot of stuff very quickly that seems easy but is super hard for a computer. As an example think of a walking humanoid robot. The reason most robot makers dont do humanoids is because to actually make a robot walk is incredibly complicated. I mean you don’t remember spending 2 years crawling on the floor chewing on the floorboard trying to figure out how to walk as an infant. You just think “well walking is easy I do it all the time”. But all the things that go into that are hugely complicated that we just internalize and automate. The way we play games is the same. we internalize strategies. We see patterns. But we can’t really ‘describe’ them. Its just “The Ai shouldn’t have done that”.
The AI guys aren’t in the back twiddling their thumbs. AI is hard work and requires a lot of trade offs between CPU cycles, how long things take to process, etc. If AI was ‘easy’ everyone would be doing it.
You are wrong in multiple levels, AI simulation is in fact extremely easy for almost any computer nowadays , in fact even your smartphone can run it. When mentioning “computers in size of apartman complex” i suppose you were talking about the ones used to train neural networks , but thats still irrelevant since a NN would need to be trained only once and running a trained neural network is still , quite very easy.
Only problem with AI is the time it takes to code it , which shouldnt be an issue to microsoft. There is no point of mentioning cpu cycles as core logic of games almost never use more than 10 percent of a single thread , not the mention AI can quite easily be multithreaded.
Render calls BY FAR take more cpu cycles than simulating even the most complex AI does