To me AI is what is holding back video games the most. The graphics have advanced incredibly in the last 20 years, but the AI seems to be increasing on a logarithmic scale.
Even strategy games designed content usually come from you beating an opponent with a superior starting position.
What you really want is more immersive AI. Not in terms of the intelligence, but in the ability to do actions that interact with the environment. But this usually requires one off animation and gameplay coding so its not something that can scale easily. Things like hiding under something form a large enemy and thinking "he can't get me" but then, oh shit, turns out he is capable of crawling.
Little things like letting an actor turn its head to look at things will make the AI feel more alive than a more advanced algorithm for behavior. And you definitely won't see any particular gains by trying to solve it with ML brains.
I wouldn't mind that. I would be fine with an opponent like Scar in BSG:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_(Battlestar_Galactica)
Something that's actually smart and really, really not just there for you to kill, for once.
You may not have meant that, but it is what you said :).
You just decided you are going to crap all over my comment and crap all over what I said I'd like to see in a game because it does not agree with some kind of idea you have about "fun" in games.
More fool me for commenting in a thread about games.
I could be wrong here, but it may be worth going back and reading what was said again and the obvious inference multiple people took from your original comment, even if it wasn't what you meant.
Good luck!
With deep learning maybe we have a hope to reach the other side where AI can add value.
So we're stuck in a kind of AI limbo.
Efforts exist in beating humans in specific games like chess; these games are often symmetric, i.e. all players compete on fair ground, and the AIs aim to replace human players. But most games don't want this! Most games seek theatrical asymmetry in computer-controlled agents. Most games want the illusion of cleverness without actually being clever, because most players don't want their gaming experience interrupted by undefeatable killer robots. Most games are power fantasies.
I posit that what we actually want is simply some programming pattern for managing complexity in autonomous theatrical agents. Some way to organize the creative will of the game designer easily enough that it democratizes independent developers to craft interesting behaviors.
I've got my own ideas but they're as of yet unproven.
Emphasis mine.
They use an AI trained on PvP player behaviour, so the NPCs jump around, respond to teammates being injured, try to catch you off-rotation, etc.
In my opinion, it wouldn't work for bosses though, as part of the fun is exactly about understanding the tells and patterns. If you want to fight against intelligent enemies, just play PvP! I think if you play without addons like BigWigs/DeadlyBossMods you'll have much more fun, if what you're looking for is unpredictability.
Plus, would there really be that much of a difference between a machine-learned approach and a decision tree when every action the boss can perform needs to be pre-programmed anyway, and have predefined ranges/optimal uses? Maybe a different game could combine that with something like Magicka, where there are spell "recipes" which can be combined, so the AI would have more options to play with.
Another example is things like Dark Souls, the bosses are so engaging to its players _because_ you can learn to understand how they respond to your positioning. If they were a moving target, there would be no point in doing anything but learning the animations for each attack so you can dodge, so in the end they would be _less_ intellectually engaging.
The AI could be unaware of its tells or that it's telegraphing moves. Even more wild would be if the AI could be aware, so that maybe it tries to cover the status light or hide the weapon from view while it charges up. That in itself would be a tell.
That seems like a reasonable first step imho.
Getting the feeling you're being actively stalked by a sentient creature is legitimately terrifying, and it's the first time I've felt scared by the intelligence of a game's AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7d5lF6U0eQ goes into some detail on the decision paths governing the AI.
I've heard that the easier difficulty is scarier, because the alien appears less often so when it does it's more terrifying.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/designing-the-enem...
There's definitely a balance between "real" and "fun".
(I am not 100% sure though. Was my initial thought when playing HL2)
Players like to feel smart.
(and beyond perceptual tasks like vision, does modern AI benefit from GPUs that much?)