crumas2 said: You're a disgrace to software developers. AI has nothing to do with powerful CPU, this is the last thing you should have talked about related to CPU power. To make the matter worse, AI (excuse me, heuristics) is often what is used to reduce the raw computer power needed in most CPU intensive tasks. Sorry, but I'm not sure I can help you here. If you don't understand how AI can be used within a game to control several hundred independent computer-controlled fighters (RTS games being the primary example), then I don't know how to bring you up to speed in a reasonable period of time. Perhaps this can help: imagine you write a program that causes a computer-controlled character to move across a battlefield, avoid your own troops, and then attack against your fortifications. Now imagine that your code needs keep track of and control 125 of these characters. And your code also needs to determine object collisions between those troops, control your troops based on the high-level commands you've issued, determine object collisions between your troops, determine sounds to be issued based on the hundreds of concurrent independent activities, determine clipping regions based on other objects in the environment (such as walls, vehicles, large weapons, trees, etc.), etc, etc. This part of the software isn't controlled by the GPU, but by the CPU. The more concurrent tasks you have, the more horsepower required to keep everything moving smoothly as your code switches between tasks/threads. |
I do have some practical experience with AI, and while what you said is true I think you're overstating the importance of processing power for AI in the vast majority of games. In most games the majority of CPU processing power goes towards preparing data for the GPU (including managing the scenegraph, performing animation, and so on), and AI tends to be a much smaller consideration (with a large portion of the processing power going towards interpreting a scripting language which the AI scripts are written in).
Very few games actually have as many objects being manipulated through AI as you suggest (in most cases any objects far enough away from the player are static), and most of the intelligent interaction provided by the AI in PS3/XBox 360/PC games is produced from more complicated scripts and not through increased processing power; this means that they are entirely possible on the Wii.
I have to agree with ookaze that AI was a bad choice for a shortcomming of the Wii not having the additional processing power of the PS3/XBox 360 ...
Physics would have been a much better choice but, being that the two of the most interesting physics games are for the Wii and most gamers probably can't tell the difference between a poor simulation using ODE and a much better simulation using a more advanced physics engine, I'm not sure there is a big issue with this.
