Sophisticated Artificial Intelligence for NPCs/Followers ?

[lord_vader]

Is it possible to make a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence for NPCs/Followers like the one shown in the link below?

 

https://atlanticcenturion.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/zeitgeist-in-the-shell/

[Vaelorian]

Far too complex for the Skyrim engine to run for multiple actors. Hell, I'm not even sure if the game could reasonably process one actor with fitting scripts, not to mention I don't know if there's sufficient interest for this gargantuan project to be started - let alone completed.

[spoonsinger]

There was/is a thing on Youtube which used Skyrim as a basis for npc AI improvements. I can't seem to find it but I'm fairly sure that it was as a sort of student thing which had two Markarth factions fighting together but with their own individual ai packages based on their actual roll within their specific faction.

 

ummm, might be part of this series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTDSGU2vAow&list=PL-U2vBF9GrHGORYfnj6DOAFN1FgEzy9UA&index=8 ) but busy so not going to look any further.

[Frel]

Is it possible to make a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence for NPCs/Followers like the one shown in the link below?

 

https://atlanticcenturion.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/zeitgeist-in-the-shell/

Here's the thing:

 - Tay was running in a cluster of computers and it's only purpose was to be Tay in a word that is resumed by receiving and sending text messages

 

 - a NPC in a game like Fallout run on a single computer, share the computing resources with the game engine (and yes GPU is a computing resource) and need to interact with the user (interact is not just answer to a tweet but be proactive to say something) and further interact with the world: navigate, fight, do stupid things to make the player feel they are in the world (you know such as when the settlers bang your wall: it may be annoying but much more immersive than them staying still just waiting for you to speak)

 

So Tay as virtually infinite CPU and its interaction remains fairly restricted and just a reaction to user input: answer to the damn tweet. I am not saying it is easy but admit that it is very limited: it does not do things unprompted and it does -- albeit a complex one -- only one thing. All of this allow to make it very complex and advanced: restricted problem + infinite CPU => a lot of CPU to deal on how to do the damn single thing

 

A game NPC is one in hundreds, that needs to not only speak but act in something that is helpfull for the game: that does not only mean help you fight (or fight you) but also interracts with you both when asked but also do things you as a player did not ask (so you know they feel kind of alive).

A lot of things to do for a lot of NPC on computer that has at most 2 GPUs and say 8 cores (I know ther can be more but honestly most gaming PC are nowhere close to the specs here) => keep it simple if you want it to kind of work

 

So no with current gaming PC an AI like Tay in a game would be ridiculous to make: very complex to design due to the large set of actionsd the NPC could take, very hard to handle while the game need to also compute other things (rendering the 3D but also deal with physic and lets not forget handle the basic core of the gameplay) in a system that needs to be modest enough that gamers can play it (only cry was stupid enough to gloat that their engine was so "advanced" that no modern PC could run their game)

 

 Finally, An AI lead by ML has its side effects, of course the Tay scenario is more showing what social engineering can do to mess a demo (people spamming bad things to a system that is a learning sponge resulted on the sponge puking back the garbage they fed it) but  still if you have the NPC being too much a learner that makes him fairly difficult to handle when tit comes to story telling (a very controlled process). Don't get me wrong the can be balance to it where only a subset of the things can be tweeked by learning in a very controlled way. But to take a recent not-so-successful erxample in recent game look at the Drivatar in Forza: the idea was sound learn how your friend drive to create some AI based on it, well the result showed two things:

 - gamers playing Forza (or any racing game) trend to drive poorly and ram in car ahead of them

 - doing race with AI ramming on you other and other when you are ahead is not very fun   

[mexicanofwar]

It seems like an interesting concept but what would be the use in a game like skyrim and fallout for something of this size, just a proof of concept or is there some context to this?

 

[prinyo]

Seems it is possible, but it needs a lot of work.

 

You need to make a SKSE plugin, find an AI API or develop some AI functionality yourself, write the interface for communicating with it and so on.

Note that you don't need to use the game for the AI stuff, you simply use an external processing application and feed the info from/to the game via the SKSE plugin.

 

 

The use in game can be talking to your followers like you talk with Siri.

Or talk to them in a more "human" way about how they feel, what do they think about the weather and whatever the player wants to talk to them. 

 

I can actually see it as a very entertaining and lore-friendly mod for FO4 as it will fit well with the robots followers. 

 

In both cases it can be taken to an even higher level by aggregating the experience that all the AIs have in all the modded games. Crowdsourced AI development. 

 

Unfortunately for me it requires C++ experience, so I can only hope someone will write it.