The AI of GoldenEye 007 | Hacker News Reader

The AI of GoldenEye 007

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201 pointsdanso41 comments

It is fascinating to see how many AI techniques were developed from the need to produce realistic agents/behaviors/mappings in video games. This document of Left 4 Deads techniques blew me away when I read it. (Not having worked in the industry but as connoisseur of video games).

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2009/ai_systems_o...

Another notable game AI that is still considered quite outstanding is the AI from F.E.A.R that uses a planning-based approach.

Article: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/03/why-fears-ai-is-...

GDC presentation by the developer: https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear...

I wanted to post this as well. Whenever I think of game A.I. the two games that always come to mind are Half-Life 2 and F.E.A.R.

Half-Life 1 as well, it was pretty novel how soldiers would take cover behind crates and then throw grenades

I remember that as well, and made for a very exciting experience.

> a notable example is the guards on the dam which can't see you until you approach their walkways and this is because the STANs at the top of the ladder can only see those at the bottom.

It's a credit to the game that I never noticed this and other AI shortfalls. Somehow the combination of fast paced action, tense stealth gameplay, level design, and good enough AI was enough to transcend any critical faculties I had. I guess the lesson there is whether it's CGI, VR, or game AI, when you understand your limitations and design to them, you can get the audience to do the rest of the work in their head completely unaware of the shortcomings that are not only hidden from them but that they may be compensating for.

"not only" --> "not even" ?

The shortcomings are both hidden and being compensated for (“not only the one, but also the other”).

Did folks who knew how to program back then still love games like GoldenEye?

I loved it and we played it all the time but I was a kid and didn't understand computers or programming yet. I'm wondering if understanding how something was made would have made it less enjoyable? Less addicting?

I knew a fair amount at the time (enough to write some really bad programs for my own personal use). I definitely still loved that game (enough to write a fairly popular though mostly wrong guide for it).

I didn't love Goldeneye in particular, but I was in college for CompSci and had done a little OpenGL.

No, knowing (roughly, from a very 50,000 foot kind of view) how those games were made did NOT diminish my love for them.

If anything, it really enhanced my enjoyment and appreciation for them. Having made my own simple programs I was very appreciative of the gulf between my weekly programming assignments and the massive amounts of technical wizardry and craft that went into something like a polished retail game.

I don't think video games ever really fooled me into thinking they were anything but simulations operating according to some underlying rules.

After all, even if you know nothing about programming, your goal as a player is to figure out those rules in order to beat the CPU and win the game!

But those rules often delighted me anyway, and I always had a hefty dose of willing suspension of disbelief, so even something like a 16-bit RPG could really connect with me emotionally....

Sure. As long as there is something compelling (whether game play, storytelling, graphics, AI... whatever) about a given game, it can still be a lot of fun even when you know how it's made.

I was around the "hello world" level when this came out, but in some ways playing and programming are/were quite similar, a big part of playing was mentally de-compiling behaviors like this and part of the fun. One of the things that made Goldeneye stand out at the time was that this sort of complex behavior was used for all/most of the enemies, previously this was mostly reserved for boss fights.

I was a kid, back then, but I'd taught myself programming with the intention of making games. To me, having an idea of all the tricks used to make the virtual worlds come alive really deepened my appreciation for games in general.

Now, with nearly a decade as a professional software engineer split evenly between developing training simulations and AAA video games, I appreciate the craft and behind the scenes stuff more than ever.

I played the pseudo-sequel (perfect dark) around then (early 2000s-ish?) and enjoyed it. The AI was humorous, but brutal on higher difficulties. I had no coding experience at that time.

A few years after that I got a hold of Unreal/UT and there was a... "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" moment when I opened UnrealEd and everything just kind of fell into place. The way videogames were constructed was revealed, and I stopped seeing cool visuals and started seeing static meshes and particle emitters.

I still enjoy modern games, but in a more 'what are they going to going to do with this idea/story' than 'how'd they do that effect?!' sense. Probably the last true "This is awesome!" videogame moment I had was banking sawblades off the walls of DM-deathfan or whatever the outdoor variant map was called. I suppose spending a day with amnesia would be worth it to experience that again.

Edit: oh, and I should give a shoutout to Unreal 2 here, for what it's worth. It flopped big time in popularity, but still did amazing things in that era, graphically speaking. Seems appropriate the engine evolved to become an industry-standard later on.

I largely learned to program from a desire to write or modify games. Doing so was its own enjoyment and "addiction".

This wasn't really possible on consoles, but on PCs and the home computer era it was a mainstay. I started with "type-in" games in magazines, and books on programming the BBC micro. In the PC era there was a huge explosion of this with DOOM editors (DEU), later Quake and so on. I remember tinkering with the level definition files in some games and reverse-engineering the file format.

There is one life lesson from all this which could benefit anyone, though: cheating trivialises your own achievement and destroys the potential for more fun. But also it's not healthy to put too much weight on an achievement that's just a few easily flippable bits.

In a similar vein, I never noticed how Half-Life 2's AI seems to have something in common with the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal from Hitchihker's Guide to The Galaxy - it believes that if you can't see it, it can't see you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0WqAmuSXEQ

They spent all that energy on NPC AI yet the multiplayer respawn points were incredibly predictable after you memorized the sequence. Eventually multiplayer wasn't fun anymore when playing against other people who knew the sequence. You could easily kill a player and then sprint to the next spawn point and kill them again. Wash rinse repeat. Fun if you were the one on the spree, not fun if you got caught in that cycle.

Haha yep! My brother and I even got the minimum distance to spawn figured out. Basically, if you got too close to the spawn point, the AI would skip it and move to the next. But you could be just a little ways off and not trip the proximity. It was a vicious cycle indeed. Turning on License to Kill basically guaranteed whoever got the first shot of the game would own the rest.

> But you could be just a little ways off and not trip the proximity.

Speaking of which, proximity mines didn't trigger this proximity either ;)

Once memorized you could get around on many levels just as fast as re-spawns could happen and your opponent couldn't break the cycle. At some point 3 players is a must.

Similar thing happened to Quake 3, where in initial versions the repawn order wasn't predefined, but close to it. Some guys who spent time studying it got quite a competitive advantage. id fixed that later, making respawns totally random.

Yeah, the spawn point led us to tell people no camping since that would ruin the fun.

I remember reading that multiplayer was pretty much an afterthought for GoldenEye. It wasn't planned, they just sort of hacked it together and snuck it in.

Multiplayer might have been an afterthought, but for me and my friends Goldeneye was crazy fun in multiplayer. We mostly played with 4 people at the same time.

I believe we played mostly "the man with the golden gun" in "The Basement" level and that felt pretty balanced, as long as no one picked Oddjob :)

Rocket launchers in the stack.

Proximity mines in the complex. LTK.

This article mentions the expansion pak but this wasn’t even released at the time of the game. The sequel, Perfect Dark, relies heavily on the expansion, while Donkey Kong 64 requires it due to a game breaking bug.

I got the impression that the expansion RAM is mentioned (in a screenshot) to convey how little RAM there was period, even with the pak. Neither the article nor the video (afaik) claim that Goldeneye had access to that RAM

The only reason the game came with the expansion pak was to fix that one memory bug, IIRC.

They couldn't figure it out, but realised the game didn't crash when it had a bit more ram so they just gave everybody an expansion pak.

That's hilarious, I wonder how much that ended up costing them?

I keep hoping someone'll remake it for the Quest VR headset. The cartoonish graphics would fit in beautifully, and it'd probably be a blast.

Are there any good games for the Quest that you recommend ?

Thus far, my favorites are Beat Saber (typically not my thing, but it's great exercise), Superhot (makes me feel like Neo in the Matrix, including rolling around on the floor - the room scale stuff shines here), and Space Pirate Trainer. Vader Immortal has potential, but right now there's only the first episode so it's short.

Oh, there's a free ISS game that's quite good. You can explore the station and go for a space walk.

Not for the Quest, but you can play N64 games, including golden eye using the dolphin vr emulator: https://dolphinvr.wordpress.com

>>> Released two years after the launch of the film

That explains the weird sort of feeling I remember about this game - that I had missed out for ages on this game (and clearly was not a member of the cognoscenti) and so was playing what everyone else already knew about.

Weirdly no young person in the age of wikipedia will feel that for long anymore...

Damn I miss the old Rare.

Now that industrial AI has taken off, it's even more striking how pompous it is to call simple game enemy logic 'Artificial Intelligence'.

I don't think so at all. Just because better AI exists today doesn't invalidate earlier efforts. That would be like taking umbrage at people calling the BBC Micro a computer because we have more powerful hardware today.

Another important thing to understand is that "industrial AI" and "game AI" have different goals.

Industrial AI's main goal is solving hard problems.

Game AI's main goal is to provide an entertaining experience to the player within the context of a game, no more, no less.

Space invaders AI can be coded by any amateur programmer, however it succeeds in being entertaining while playing the game.

People have also used similar techniques (neural nets) to ‘industrial AI’ in game AI long before as well[1]. It’s also silly in an industrial context to use a more fashionable technique when a less fashionable one will do the job better.

[1] http://www.ai-junkie.com/misc/hannan/hannan.html

What is "AI" has never been very strictly defined. ELIZA is also considered an AI, just an extremely primitive one.

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