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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

What a treat it was listening to two legends talk with great passion about software they made 30 years ago.

I absolutely loved their answer to a question regarding better enemy AI, which boiled down to “better enemy AI doesn’t automatically make for a more fun game”. (they put fun and player experience first and aren’t tricked by shiny new toys)

Was also interesting hearing Carmack lament how so few much loved games release their source code (he attributed doom’s longevity partly to the release of its source code)

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The original F.E.A.R. always stuck out to me for its AI. Not because the actual AI is very smart - most enemies still are dumb lugs that try to get the player and have basic "is seen, rush down" AI, but because the player gets a lot of feedback for their actions.

The main way to trick a player into thinking an AI is smarter than it actually is? Have their voicelines "cheat" a bit and respond very vocally to things the player does near them; even if the enemy can't see the player, the idea of "oh shit, they heard that" can really enhance the seeming intelligence of the enemies.

Given that F.E.A.R. is a horror themed shooter, that's a big boon.

It's a testament to the game that its AI is still this memorable. Have there been any advances in that area since then? I'm not at home in the singleplayer FPS genre anymore, how do the SP campaigns of the newer Halo or CoD games hold up?

Far Cry enemies were relatively smart in the first episode too.

> Was also interesting hearing Carmack lament how so few much loved games release their source code (he attributed doom’s longevity partly to the release of its source code)

I blame middleware. Hell, middleware makes even releasing the mod tools harder, i remember when i worked at some gamedev company and we wanted to release the editor for our game and the company behind some middleware we used wanted us to buy a separate license for it.

> I blame middleware

I think John Carmack does too - from memory Doom's source release had no sound code because it was done externally.

Is there any organization that buys up rights to classic games and then releases them as open source, removing/replacing third party dependencies in the process?

If not, we should start one.

Javier Chavez bought Keen Dreams with some crowdfunding help and GPLed its’ source. (I’m guessing the graphical and other game assets remain proprietary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen_in_Keen_Dreams#...

Thanks! Having the source code be open source is definitely a step towards preservation.

Are you allowed to say which game (or engine)?

Monster infighting added so much to the game and was relatively "cheap" to program.

What other games even use it apart from Doom, Quake and Half Life? (HL 1 had some impressive AI)

Marathon had monster infighting.

Marathon is a game series from Bungie, the first version released shortly after Doom, but only on Macintosh.

There are defense drones [0] that aid the player and later on enslaved cybernetic aliens [1] that revolt against their alien overlords.

As in Doom, if an enemy would accidentally hit another enemy, they would fight one another.

The Marathon series can be played on modern computers using Aleph One [2]

---

[0]: https://marathongame.fandom.com/wiki/Marathon_Automated_Defe...

[1]: https://marathongame.fandom.com/wiki/S%27pht

[2]: https://alephone.lhowon.org/

They gave a couple examples of the kind of AIs that don’t make games fun. One was some game (real or hypothetical) where you fight a small drone that’s very smart and fast, so it’s hard to shoot at. Another was where the enemy goes off and concocts a sophisticated plan to beat you.

They described how the player wants to feel like the game play is about themselves, not about some ultra smart enemy. So big and dumb enemies tend to work best, even though they don’t use sophisticated AI by today’s standards.

It was like the the Jurassic Park meme: just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

(Also very strong agree on monster infighting, it added so much depth, as a kid I didn’t even know monsters could infight until the level with cyberdemon and arachnotron in the same room)

Consider an FPS AI with perfect tracking and aim, or a starcraft AI with perfect blink stalker micro. It's a smart play, but not fun for the player

Or the Deus Ex “ai” which people praised as feeling very intelligent- but was just programmed scripted sequences based on what the player most likely would do.

So a state machine? My unchecked suspicion would be that 99% of all enemy AI in gaming history are state machines of some sort.

Yeah, in the end it's all if-this-happens-do-that under the hood. And that's important because game AI must be deterministic. Otherwise reproducing bugs would be impossible.

> all enemy AI in gaming history are state machines of some sort.

Couldn't that be said about all natural intelligences too? "state machines of some sort" is a very broad characterisation fitting almost anything.

Aren't most elements in video games, including the player characters, state machines?

Do you have a source? I had never heard this.

sophisticated AI != aimbot accuracy

Some games are so complex that AI on the higher difficulty levels resorts to cheating. I understand the rationale behind it, but it has always rubbed me the wrong way.

Off the top of my head, several roguelikes (e.g. ADOM, Caves of Qud, ToME) and several entries in the TES series (e.g. Daggerfall, Skyrim) support it.

I also remember at some point playing an RPG where you found an ongoing even fight between two armies and you could join one to make the fight go your way, but I don't remember what it was.

Sounds like Skyrim and the fight between the Empire and the Stormcloaks.

Minecraft. Triggering it so skeletons kill creepers was the primary way to get music discs

In Tears of the kingdom you can shoot muddle buds to monsters and they’ll start fighting each other.

The original Halo trilogy, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, The Last of Us, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, to name a few. A great mechanic!

A lot of Last of Us players don't realise you can grab a hunter or infected, and then "feed" them to a clicker.

The original Turok on the N64 had this too :) It just was very hard to trigger for obvious reasons, as humans and dinosaurs spawned far apart

Halo, you can let the Covenant and Flood fight each other and clean up whoever is left.

Oh, that was so much fun. The best was to get a strong creature in Quake pissed off at the zombies who basically never died, and they would fight forever until the zombie prevailed.

I think I managed to get a Shambler pissed off at some zombies once, there was much shredding.. but the zombies always won in the end while I hid and watched.

Monster Hunter has it, it's pretty epic seeing massive creatures fight each other and you, a tiny human with an oversized weapon, running for your life and / or awaiting your opportunity to kill them and use their corpses to make new weapons/armor.

> Was also interesting hearing Carmack lament how so few much loved games release their source code

Couldn't agree more - it's sad that id is/was one of the exceptions.

I'm still waiting for the GoldSource engine to be open sourced...

FWIW there is Xash3D[0] which while not technically open source, it does provide some of the practical benefits of having an open source engine (the issue is that Xash3D uses some HLSDL headers and needs to link against HLSDK to work but HLSDK is not compatible with GPL - the devs have tried to contact Valve for letting them use HLSDK with GPL but Valve never responded). Specifically it has been ported to a bunch of platforms and supports not only Half-Life but also other GoldSource-based games (e.g. i was able to play Gunman Chronicles using it - i have the original CD version but it has DRM that makes it impossible to play under Linux, meanwhile with Xash3D the game plays natively and i can use raw mouse input and widescreen resolutions).

[0] https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs

Wasn't GoldSource based on the Quake engine? I'm reading that it's heavily modified, mainly in terms of enemy AI.

It is but it was a reasonable leap on Quake - Quake had 256 colour palette for the whole game whereas Half-Life had a 256 colour palette per texture, Half-Life got coloured lighting, Quake had game code written in QuakeC whereas Half-Life had game code written in C/C++, Quake had vertex animations but Half-Life had skeletal animations etc. Definitely the same bones and I'd say that a lot of engine code would be identical, but there were some big changes that aren't trivial to implement in id Tech 2 to get feature parity with Half-Life.

Yup - mostly Quake, some QuakeWorld, some Quake II.

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