200 plus AI on screen - Halo Reach

[_mevildan]

@Hisiru

After reading through the posts on this thread, I must say that you have been posting a wonderful collection of nonsense.

These are your comments that made me chuckle:
"Enemies =/= AI"
"We are talking about AI (something smart)."
"Something more realistic."
"High numbers =/= Good AI."
"We are talking about 200 SMART enemies at once"
"Stupid characters with pre-programed actions (attack you/walk)"
"In Halo the enemies are always moving and searching for some kind of wall, so they will be protected by the wall, in this case they are really trying to survive AND attack you at the same time"
"enemies in Halo are always trying to survive and move (something that you can do from any distance)."
"That video IS the Elite mode lol. And the flaw is clearly there."
"trying to survive and give you more trouble."

You use these words like "smart", "good", "more", "really trying", "survive" etc etc to try and say that this Halo AI is some other worldy kind of AI, not just simple reactions by dumb bots. I am afraid I must tell you that Halo AI is not unlike the AI of most games.

AI programming in the video game world (especially FPSs) is very much smoke and mirrors. The developers have to try and make characters appear to be as clever as they can, but as simply as possible. And they have succeeded to make very impressive examples of the years. In terms of action games, F.E.A.R, Half-Life, Halo, Killzone 2 come to mind (oh but I know you don't agree with at least one of those in my list).

Another annoying thing you keep going on about is about characters hiding and trying to kill you etc. These kind of actions are just one small part of AI. You keep bashing Heavenly Sword saying those enemies are stupid and that AI is hardly any achievement etc. What about the fact that they have to traverse the 3d environment they are in, while still not walking into each other (collision avoidance with that many NPCs in a 3d environment is quite a feat). Those enemies all have to check on each other's AI states too, even if that is just walk and attack as you say (which I can assure you it isn't). Dude, you don't know what you are talking about. I am a programmer. I have written AI systems before. I am guessing you haven't.

And you keep harping on about these flaws in Killzone's AI. Of course it has flaws. EVERY game AI does. Because as I mentioned above, there are no "SMART enemies" or characters without "pre-programmed actions". It's all very much state driven. The good AI implementations (like Halo for example) just do a very good job at the smoke and mirrors.

If you actually played through Killzone (instead of posting links to videos showing how shit the AI is), you would probably be impressed. The flanking and hiding of the helghast is very impressive. The way they search for cover, blindfire, grenade you to death if you try and hide from them etc. It's top stuff. For every one video showing it's hideous flaws, I am sure I could make 10 showing it's finer moments. Picking out flaws like that is the equivalent of the tactic of quote mining.

So there you go. Make of that what you will.