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Comment by klaussilveira | Hacker News Reader

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klaussilveira·

That is a very clean GOAP implementation.

FYI, GOAP was what made F.E.A.R such a cool game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaOLBOuyswI

https://archive.org/details/GDC2006Orkin

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GOAP := Goal-Oriented Action Planning

GOAP has worked very well for us for an open-world game with tons of NPCs taking part in non-linear interweaving quest lines. Planning performance is an ever growing issue however…

I am looking to do same! What do you mean by planning performance? How bad is it?

The performance of the planning algorithm (which is a path-finding algorithm essentially, which can be costly).

Goals have to evaluate their preconditions/etc and depending on your game to do so might be expensive. If a precondition for a goal is that a place in the world is reachable, you'd need to be able to run a pathfinding query to satisfy it. Other game systems might have bad Big-O as content gets added. The mission availability system in our game is one example, as we doubled the number of quests and NPCs post-launch and had to do some optimization.

Yeah, F.E.A.R. left a lasting impression on me. NPCs charted a path around the level to sneak up behind me and kill me while I was in a protracted firefight with the rest of their buddies.

I now have a strong need to go and replay F.E.A.R and see how well it holds up! I remember back in the day comparing it favorably to Half Life 2, which still holds up well.

if you do, be sure to check PCGamingWiki to see what you should do to make it run as well as possible on modern machines—I ran into issues both with F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins, another title from the same developer https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/F.E.A.R.#Essential_improve...

TIL

Thanks for this. I loved the ai in that game. Very few games are as good without cheating even today.

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