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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

This is what I was expecting from AI in games

We’ll have made it as a species when the harvester in C&C no longer gets stuck or wanders through the enemy base.

In all seriousness though, I think RTS games (I only do single player) would be more fun for me personally if I could leave the economy/build order stuff to a reasonable AI and focus instead on military unit control. I’m just not someone that can handle all of that at once.

I think the potential for an enemy tailored to challenging and occasionally surprising me without simply overwhelming me would also be great.

Totally off topic, but RTS is a weird split genre.

I really like the economy / base building part, but care less for unit control. I’m more of a macro player than micro.

I think a lot of players fall on one side or the other.

Clearly we need a team game where you can control the economy and I can control the armies. And if we start to lose we can curse and blame each other.

You can do this is Beyond All Reason - which is the best RTS I've played in years even though it's free/beta.

Even better. It's open-source. I've contributed a few small bug fixes myself.

thankfully, the genre has been dissected so there are games like revolution that focus on the warring armies aspect, and games like sim city that focus on the building aspect. and then there are factory games, which is a whole genre unto itself.

Sim City is older than RTS, or at least older than the genre defining RTS of Dune 2. Herzog Zwei release at about the same time as Sim City, and definitely didn't have any influence on it.

The factory must grow.

Did you ever play settlers? I loved building the towns.

Settlers of catan?

Weirdly enough, I’ve never played it

Probably this one or one of its successors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_II

That’s the one

> In all seriousness though, I think RTS games (I only do single player) would be more fun for me personally if I could leave the economy/build order stuff to a reasonable AI and focus instead on military unit control. I’m just not someone that can handle all of that at once.

Just pick an RTS game without base building? They exist.

2 upcoming games for you to check out:

1. Industrial Annihilation: a dual-mode game where you can build a base or manage an army and the AI will happily handle the rest.

2. Battle Aces: unit-management distilled by almost entirely removing building from the game.

What about RTS games specialising on the military part? I haven't played them myself, but I think the Company of Heroes series is like this, light on base building and focusing more on the military aspect.

WARNO and it's predecessors have zero base building. You can place down a single Forward Operating Base that is just a supply truck without wheels, but everything else comes from off screen onto the game.

With more and more fixes for “hallucinations”, and with smaller models getting more capable (or bigger models getting more efficient, depending on how you look at it), I have a feeling that eventually it’ll be cheaper to render things neurally rather than rasterized.

Imagine if you could describe what is happening on the screen, including the state of the world and everything, with a really long prompt. You dynamically alter that prompt continuously based on inputs received.

There will be a point in the future where the prompt will render with 99% consistency. You’d probably still need some sort of barebones state server for things like hitboxes and to prevent cumulative divergence.

Still a ways away though :)

Well, the holy grail in games for AI will always be ... AI.

Like, actually really pseudo intelligent companions you can converse with. Not gonna happen in the foreseeable future, and the job markets are gonna be... Well... essentially gone once that exist, so it's probably for the best that this tech isn't actually anywhere close to AGI

I’d love to see a real improvement in games where the NPCs think further than a few if statements. If AI could track context of conversations and include player actions such as quests, relationships, deaths etc to influence decisions or outcomes it would add lots of enjoyment for me.

For me it’s either Stardew Valley or Paradox type games for my single player itch or in the past I’ve ventured off to MMORPGs like Eve or Wurm and play in “single player” mode.

MMORPGs have a greater sense of world change as players can carve mountains and build estates while slaying champions and such in Wurm online and you can stick to your plot of land and have nothing to do with it while enjoying the benefits. This doesn’t exist in single player games but it could and should.

Although I don’t agree AI will be taking jobs but it will just be another tool used in the industry. We need to embrace change and use these new tools to make better content and not just assume jobs will be lost.

> If AI could track context of conversations and include player actions such as quests, relationships, deaths etc to influence decisions or outcomes it would add lots of enjoyment for me.

From what people say about them Bethesda games try to do this, but it seems like the result is they're impossibly buggy because noone can test all of that.

Undertale is low tech, but does track player deaths and use them in the story.

Didn't downvote you (and not sure why anyone would), but I still disagree: Aren't games ultimately all about interacting with other people?

It's already possible to play with actual other people, and quite popular too. Sure, those guys might not be very in-character or prioritise you having fun over them, but there's genuine intelligent interaction.

The other way in which games make us interact with other humans is by experiencing things designed by them. Story, dialogues, game design, atmosphere etc. I think we might see more ad-hoc generated world/story, but I think many people would want to experience the _same_ game, in some way, being social animals.

I'm not sure if and in what way generative AI or even AGI is going to disrupt the game industry. I can certainly picture the jobs of many people changing, from artists to voice actors.

But I'm not sure I see a holy gray here. Lots of interesting novelties that I'm sure will be tried, but not really a fundamental change to why we play games and consequently, what games are like.

There are plenty of games where the main feature is emergent gameplay resulting from a world simulator and the interplay of basic or complex rules. Dwarf Fortress is the OG here but also Sim City and Elite. Single player experiences are a huge segment and these will get better with LLM integration for world building and NPC agents. Fine tuned or custom models that operate on some basic state and rules could also be explored. You could train BERT family models to choose interesting state changes or actions based on the current game state for simple things like a dog NPC that would seem more intelligent by choosing the next action it should take e.g. deciding to chase a squirrel or growl at a new NPC you encountered based on its awareness of the context rather than following some rule system plus RNG. You could get rid of a lot of the stupid seeming game AI behaviour.

True, though in my mind I put these things into my "lots of interesting novelties" category. Everything in games (including the physics engine!) is typically fine-tuned to provide fun, more than realism. The same is currently true for AI (especially enemy AI), and I believe it'll continue to be that way.

Good point on the procedural aspect, Minecraft and similar games came to mind when I wrote my first post. I'd argue they are still fundamentally a designed, shareable experience, and that's my main point really. In Minecraft, you can't talk about the world much with someone else since it's generated, but the mechanics, materials, recipes etc. are the same, and provide exchange between humans playing the same game.

I believe we'll even see some successful AI heavy games in the near future, but I also believe we'll cycle back to games being, first and foremost, designed upfront. I might be wrong of course and we might see some kind of holodeck 100% custom game experience become dominant. It's just my hunch that we won't, even if it's feasible. Thinking as far back as I can, people always seem to have wanted two things from games: Fun, and connection to other people.

It depends on the game.

That’d be great for an RPG game, but if I’m playing a action adventure game or a style fighter, I generally care about how cool it looks and how smooth it plays than I do about the intelligence of the side characters.

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