Emergent Behavior in Skyrim's Fox AI
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
I.e. a fox can be leading you to a high-triangle-density area (aka treasure), or it can simply be leading you away if no treasure is about
And so players no doubt observed both of these outcomes... and hence the debate! And thus the nuances of the behavior somehow make it more magical than "fox always leads to treasure" simplicity.
So in a way, the inconsistency might've pulled more people in.
That is, that gravity is a side-effect of the fact that time moves more slowly closer to centers of mass, which causes the velocity vector of an object moving in space to turn in the direction of the time-speed gradient in space.
I'm not sure if you just meant GR and "accounts for some of gravity", but it's a common mistake I've seen people make after some youtube videos on the subject.
See https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/609217/how-much-...
There's enough interesting connections between entanglement and spacetime that it's an interesting area to prod for sure.
But since learning about the fox treasures in Skyrim (I had completely missed those theories when I first played it) I have been wondering if it's more.
I haven't heard of foxes leading you to their shrine before, only guarding it and acting as messengers to the divine. So this American game with foxes leading you to inari shrines feels to me like a nod to Skyrim nicely incorporating this Japanese folklore.
It definitely felt magical when it was new, but I think that's just a feeling. Skyrim has Radiant AI and things like NPCs taking over establishments when the owner dies. A number of dynamic behaviors which help things feel a bit more alive.
I can't remember Morrowind having any kind of dynamic behavior or emergent gameplay. Unless you count being able to lock yourself out of quests by killing important characters (including as part of other quest lines!) which is something I do miss.
As I understand it, Radiant AI is a framework for fixed and relatively simple finite state machines, with states like "use the anvil at the blacksmith's shop during working hours" or "drink in the tavern at 9 PM." Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds beyond the NPC AI found in earlier games, but it's far from the emergent craziness you'll see in a sandbox game like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. Dynamic behaviors like the one you mentioned are still all essentially scripted interactions. Dialogue, the core interaction between the player and most NPCs, is still 100% scripted conversation trees. The most interesting emergent events I remember from Skyrim (or Oblivion) were funny glitches like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvuW2Jl5ZyY
I'd also like to hear the GP commentor's reply re: emergent gameplay in Morrowind. I haven't played that game as much as the others, and don't have enough in-game experience to comment.
But when most people say emergent it is often simply dynamic systems or context sensitive scripts they mean, so I assumed that was likely what they meant.
Skyrim has a number of these: NPCs you've charmed can leave you inheritance if they die, inns and shops can change owners in similar fashion, some scripted events like towns being captured in the civil war cause officials to be killed or exiled and replaced, ...
I wanted to know if there was more of that type of dynamic world behaviour to Morrowind than I could remember.
If you're referring to magic items having both positive and negative effects and having to find workarounds then it sounds like you're talking about basic synergy rather than emergent properties.
I do agree that it's a shame they've removed spell crafting and made some things more clearly positive or negative. But I must say I don't mind how ridiculously unbalanced magic was in Morrowind.
They travel towards a far away point from the player but near treasure areas, because of their high navmesh density, all path lead in one direction.
The design intention was saving resources.
The game probably streams the nav.mesh along with map tiles; the cost is disk I/O and RAM. Once the nav.mesh is in RAM, the game runs raycasts or A* search or whatever, the cost is CPU time. In a big flat nothing, NPCs can walk any direction they want without colliding into things, having a dense nav.mesh at that place would be a waste of resources.
The fox AI doesn’t quite maximize anything. It does something similar to random walk over nav.mesh triangles. After long enough time, random walk algorithm causes the fox to be randomly distributed over nav.mesh triangles, i.e. probability to be in any particular nav.mesh triangle is about the same. However, because nav.mesh triangles have very uneven area, the fox distribution over space is very uneven too. The fox is way more likely to be in places with dense nav.mesh because that’s where the majority of nav.mesh triangles are.
The fox is programmed to run away from the player, very simple state machine. It happens to navigate the navmesh like the player and eventually will end up leading places the player didn't think of going containing secrets.
It's not emerging intelligence as much as it is murphy's law.
Your second paragraph is not totally correct though and that’s actually what the article is about. It explains how “run away” is implemented and why this implementation leads foxes to interesting places more often than you would expect by simply running around.
BTW what do you mean by “navigate the navmesh like the player”? The player is unaware of the navmesh, am I reading your comment wrong?
Another example of emergent behavior in game AI would be if you had a police NPC and a regular NPC, and the police NPC will chase any character entity if they have stolen goods on them. As the player, you could place a stolen good on a regular NPC and the police would chase them. The developers didn't anticipate that behavior, it just emerged from the interactions between various states and abilities that they did program.
When escaping, if they get nearby a “dense” zone, their behavior makes them run towards it since there are more triangles to hop to and it makes them “feel like” they are farther away from you, instead they will keep running around in the same “dense” area.
Well… maybe I could’ve explained it better but yeah, it’s more or less like this.
TIL, I'm a fox in skyrim... /j
Like: zigzagging, passing under chairs or tables, climbing on something just to immediately climbing off. The problem is they usually maximize their effort, not yours in following them.
Nice, thanks :)
Why wild foxes led you to treasure in Skyrim
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28230305 4 Months ago | 221 comments
Transcribed text of tweets (for convenience): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28230677
After playing for a while I decided to try red dead 2 and can say that that game is so, so much better than skyrim imho.
What I think people usually like about it is the mix - magical world, graphics, decently weighty combat, big monsters, people to talk to or murder or steal from etc. It doesn't excel at any one of these, but there is also nothing else outside the series offering the same combination. Perhaps RDR2 does improve on every aspect, but the massive difference in setting will still mean that both have a place - especially for this type of exploration game.
> People will say, ah yes but the story, the lore! But if I wanted that I'd read a book.
That story and lore in the video game are exactly the reason I play video games i.e. video game can easily transport you into a world which you can see/hear/play-in instead of only imagining it in your mind. Books can never come anywhere close to that because of obvious restrictions of the medium and that was the reason, many (including me) were instantly captivated by the world of Skyrim. They successfully created a world full of atmosphere and lore along with the freedom of exploration and managed to do it excellently even compared to most of the games released now (and the thing is I also played Skyrim late in 2019, yet it is probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite game of all time).
It's unfortunate that you didn't like it, so have fun with RDR2 (which is an excellent game with arguably the best storyline and characters in any video game till date).
I did this with Oblivion, glad I did cuz I love that game
Skyrim is better in action gameplay, though it is still extremely simplistic and samey compared to BG 2. It's still much better in terms of feel and than Oblivion. But in terms of quests, Skyrim is much worse, with virtually all quests being simple "clear this cave of people who have wronged me", though there are a handful of exceptions.
But that's the game for interesting lore and world style. Skyrim is mostly a medieval world all over. Morrowind has places like:
Balmora, which looks more or less normal, but is already definitely something else, what with the giant insects used for transport: https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/es/wiki/Balmora?file=Balmora...
Vivec, made of huge, identical buildings: https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/es/wiki/Vivec_(ciudad)_(Morr...
Sadrith Mora, where wizards grow giant mushrooms to live in: https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/es/wiki/Distrito_Telvanni?fi...
Morrowind is the last game that gives the clear feeling of that it's happening in its own universe with its own weird culture.
And the main plot, which starts quite standard but by the end you're not sure if you're being fooled or not.
It's best played under OpenMW, and maybe a few mods to fix some of the rough edges.
I really love emergent gameplay and I only say this because I was rather let down by skyrim's lack of emergence compared to morrowind.
It's not a /very/ emergent game but it has more to offer than skyrim. The speedrun completes in something like 10 minutes using a variety of exploits.
By the end of my last (vanilla) playthrough I could fly through the sky like superman at 100mph, you really can't do things like that in skyrim.
That's the point of levitate on target. ;) (On enemies, of course.)
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195
Its chemistry engine which allows "elements" (heat, wind, electricity, magnetism,...) and material properties (combustible, magnetic, metallic,...) to react without any specific scripts per item.
This leads to cases such as when I chopped down an apple tree with an enchanted fire sword. The sword made the tall grass catch fire. This created an updraft. Wood from the tree caught fire and turned into a fireplace (with a prompt to sit and wait by the fire). The apples turned into baked apples from the heat.
The bug that was eventually fixed was that a cat that walked through a spilled mug and cleaned itself shouldn't have been considered to have drunk a whole mug.
Flocking is an emergent behavior that is basically minimizing a loss function of "maintain x distance". If you implemented boid AI (birds) in skyrim and used triangle count as your metric, you'd be able to spot points of interest by the sudden increase in density of flocks. But players might extrapolate to the idea that "birds flock denser in cities". But no one programmed that behavior. It just emerged.
Emergence is more a behavior that results from the relationship between two parts of a system. The fox fleeing behavior leads you to interesting things only when coupled with the way the triangles are laid out. The two parts of the world model together bring out the emergent behavior.
I guess its kind of what seafarers did with birds
But I’m thinking more about altering an environment to make animal non player characters assist humans
Now, this is borderline in my book as the fox pathfinding system isn't meant to point towards high mesh density locations, that's really more of a happy bug.
> Legends tell of such celestial foxes providing wisdom or service to good and pious humans as they act as mediums between the celestial and human worlds.
Really fun little tidbit, loved it.
Spooked foxes aim to be 100 "triangles" away from the player on a pathfinding mesh. Where are they likely to run into the 100th triangle? In a place with a lot of pathing points, so it'll often lead you to a camp or something interesting.
^fits in one tweet and no cookie wall minigame required
In real life, animals might also be seeking out that 100th triangle. In low density areas like fields they are super exposed to predators and the elements so if chased or watched, they'll go to places with complexity and resources. I think this is a very amusing and interesting parallel between the virtual worlds we build and the real one nature built.
This discussion was had last time.
Unless the fox understands the idea of distance the triangles can't be dense.
If it understands distance the idea falls apart.
One explanation might be, if the fox stops and looks around after 100 triangles or some sort of signal. When it looks around, it's more likely to be in a treasure zone.
But the fox will not go toward high density triangles, because it doesn't understand density.