Can I just get good AI in grand strategy games? That would be infinitely more worth then a bot buddy in misc fps games
This is actually the use case that I've been waiting for. "AI" used to write emails and shitty college papers is cool and all, but I do just fine without it. Slap that into a video game and give me challenging NPCs? Now you're talking. I already don't eat meat and have no plans on having children; my carbon footprint can handle taking on that burden.
Fear is 20 years old and had npcs that would flank you, flush you out, play more defensively when they're down to a few people and quietly hide when there was only one left. Gotta assume game companies have just gotten to the "Good enough, ship it" point and decided shiny graphics are what the market really craves.
I vaguely remember the military on HL1 employing various tactics, and the combine in 2 heavily utilised various tactics to flush you out into flanking buddies.
Someone was recently telling me about a Skyrim combat mod where enemies will take cover, surround you and attack in unison and that was possibly made by a hobbyist.
quake 3 bots have chat replies based on the eliza chatbot, and even had clever programming to make them player-like. the easiest way to try that out is going to the tutorial zone and just writing messages. crash will reply.
some bots are hard coded to reply sometimes, and others are hard coded to never reply. crash is one of the chattier characters from what i know
the programmer for the bots actually made quake 3 bots as his thesis paper subject!
http://www.kbs.twi.tudelft.nl/docs/MSc/2001/Waveren_Jean-Paul_van/thesis.pdf
I am old enough to have played fear on CD. It's combat AI gets praised almost as often as the game comes up in internet discussions, but I think that has more to do with the current state of garbage brained NPCs than how well they were coded. The original stalker trilogy gave me more satisfying gunfights than fear or many modern games. Even the big modpacks like anomaly don't feel as good. But they could have been better, and that's what I'm hoping for.
