Quote:
Originally Posted by Freeshadow
@6charlong
I beg to differ
what you speak of are only scripts not an AI
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Most games do rely on scripted/tripwired responses to simulate AI, but some developers have tried to code more general AI-like behavior in their NPCs. With no meaningful success.
Bethesda Softworks has been trying for years and they implemented some of it in early playable builds of OBLIVION but had to dial it back because emergent behavior disrupted game play. Even the watered down version that shipped could get out of hand on occasion; one documented instance, not triggered by the player, began with a city guard chasing an underclass beggar/thief and a citizen/bystander getting injured in the crossfire and retaliating against the guard. Like an old western, the incident escalates and results in a city-wide riot and eventually everybody in town is dead. All over a loaf of bread.
Most times, however, what happens is the guard chases and kills the thief without triggering any bystander's self-defense/retaliation subroutine or catches her in the act and the player only sees the dead thief.
It is important to distinguish between the simulation of sentience (which is the goal of most AI projects) and true cybernetic sentience. The former only needs to be good enough to fool most humans, the latter has to be capable of truly independent motivation and self-awareness. The former is something extremely hard but probably achievable with known principles, the latter is probably not and will, alas, likely remain a literary and philosophical construct for the forseable future.
Interestingly enough, Bioware's MASS EFFECT games make the distinction clear and a major backstory element. Most of the computer personalities in use in the milieu are database driven personality simulations, called Virtual Inteligences, and identify themselves as such, VI's. True AIs exist within the milieu (the Geth, and others) but research and (worse) deployment of neural network systems is forbidden because of the way the low-level non-sentient Geth robots bootstrapped themselves into a collective sentience and ended up kicking their creators off their planets and into exile as "galactic gypsies" searching for a habitable world to call their own. Of course, just forbidding AI research doesn't mean it stops...
(Btw, the first game is highly recomended, even for non gamers; it is a very accessible entry point into a very detailed and well-realized universe.)