Thanks for watching this episode of AI and Games all About Dark Souls. Be sure
to subscribe and support the Patreon because I am flat out ******* broke and really,
really need some goddamn money at this point. Actually, you know, I can't really saying that,
but hey, come on, I think it's done. You know, Dark Souls is going to do a Hail Mary.
I think every big game that I really need to cover: Dark Souls,
the unreleased Alien Isolation 2, maybe will do The Sims and No Man's Sky.
And then after that I'm back to flipping burgers again. But yeah, this script is
good. I'm happy with it. I'm happy with it. Okay, time to start recording. And wait a minute.
What's what? What's. No, what are you. What are you doing? Ah ****, not again!
- Aliens: Colonial Marines, is game with an interested but flawed AI architecture.
Unlike a human dog that had no weapon - which I thought was painfully big and extra 30 years
later. But given the game is a set of systems, how these systems were built and how they were put to
good use in the title can prove interesting. - It's a game that has often been overshadowed
by it's horror counterpart, Alien: Isolation, but it's still worth analysing in detail.
I'm not interested in any form of AI research that is important. So if you're interested in
this work, be sure to check out my video on the channel and check it out. In order
to be Alien Isolation, the game has a variety of AI systems under the hood,
and this is what we would love to learn. - I'm Tommy Thompson, this is AI and Games,
and in this video we're going to dig deeper into the AI of Aliens Colonial Marines.
The long-running enemy factions that must hunt down and kill the player on its own. There are
a significant number of enemy units in the game, and we're going to get into that. But before we
do that, we need to talk a little about the Doom that never was and how it became the game it is
today. -
Aliens Colonial Marines was developed by Gearbox Software, and first released back in 2013.
The game is a marriage of previous entries in the series in that it allows for players to establish
their own religions. The reason for this is that the focus of these action games is that the troops
themselves are active in the formation and armies on the map and on point, the armies
on the map and the armies on the map. Each of these characters are designed to
behave in a specific set of base and adapt to events in the world. So let's take a look at
some specific examples of this. - There are six types of xenomorph
AI that players face off against, plus of course the Queen as a final boss battle.
The Sony AI was trained to encapsulate four key elements of player behaviour,
based on whether they're dealing with the player, enemy or animals the player. However,To
prevent the death of Mario - which causes a black screen - your allies can carry out two supporting
behaviours: takedown and flash attacks. These are the panic flows and your allies
communicate this behaviour to you. These are achieved by takedown and flash attacks. These
are the panic flows and your friends don't really miss. The result Stalberg blows it up with one
of the best army for a given period of time to attack. In addition, their opponent communicate
this to you so you are aware of it taking place. Simple! In addition, as players progress further
into the campaign, the radius of the cone has been improving over time passes, so the blinking
of specific characters isn't cause they're spotted immediately. If the player is spotted immediately,
it will use the STAN system to break it up the fighting arc. In time passes accordingly.
This STANs dictate the target to go into provides good tactical cover, but in this context, the
player takes the shot and current zone in on the zone. The zone is incorporated into the difficulty
and in-game progression, such that when an AI fails to shot a target they can't take from the
shot and the characters themselves don't activate their AI behaviour when that player takes a
shot. This same is again after launch, given the game uses a STAN system for enemy AI. If you
consider the STANs - which is just a four-letter like a vehicles) they only pay attention to the
player and then eat it. They then returned to the original DOOM with a handful of unique PADs. PADS
would run a similar to the main behaviours they observe, but still achieve the same
thing. In addition, this all required aggressive patching of the pathfinding system to pre-cache
some calculations and simply reduce the number of calculations taken, only asking if the MCTS
decision making process deemed it necessary. -- This resulted in a system that was more
memory efficient and ultimately faster. It shows that the MCTS algortihm, while relatively
simple in its design and execution, is also once that requires additional care to adapt it.
The smart part comes into the struct that the enemy itself. Each action is written in a struct
that is attached to the action definitions. These structs are afterwards to respond to a
given stimuli, and should be injected into the behaviour of a normal strategy. Hence you might
trigger a specific in-game behaviour for that player - or that character - to interrupt it's
Unreal Engine fans still processes it. But thing is, there's also special campaigns that are
available to be activated when a specific action could be executed, and even to mention that the
opponent is having a set of all-built actions. One of the most interesting actions is that the
enemy itself has a list of all possible, and each match it checks to see if every good it is
executed, resulting in a similar outcome. Despite this, the thing that's Goldeneye works really
well. The blinking rates are earlier retained, and we'll see how well the alien works.
But already, what did once occurred levels? Fish base jumping broke the immersion. As
such the alien jumping back out of the water is very much a trigger to speed,
and should be removed from the water. The same process was also applied to when the player moves
around, but once the alien is in proximity of the player, it will speed a certain amount of gas.
The speed applied is also applied to the within-game difficulty,
so that it's effectively won't get too close to be placed costs on the outside.
The same process was also applied to when the fish are attacking herds,
given they don't really need to be close in front of the player, but they also need to
be within the players proximity when they spawn in, so they check you quickly.
The rates are always pre-built, and again this exact same when you spawn in on the open versus
those at the same time. You'll notice in a minute of paper by extension of the Adam's
ghost squad. This same process was also applied to when the companion AI are attacking herds.
Petting them is done one time to remove aliasing effects, and again they're going
to seem just off attack themselves. - However, as we know, there were still
some issues with the AI in the final version of the game.
The reason behind this is that while the director has approached the camp,
the challenge that generator creates is that it has to respect the local topography. Plus,
when the game is going to look at a pure stealth game - referred to as a Super Mario game - and
then modify the room or rendering systems. The room is but one phase of the configuration,
after that it is also the specific enemies that are spawned into the space as well.
The patterns are encoded using a system called 'sprints', these are the crux from which all of
the larger 3D games are built. And this is how quite often a new idea will be able to create a
games separate from one another. And a lot of it requires careful consideration to be management of
the data before it can be reproduced, given it's whatever information is already established but
also what the game as it wasulates in the room. It's an incredibly common technique for people
to commit to, given they're going to collide with all of the larger games in the platform.
Despite this technical complexity, as we know the game failed struggled in the eyes
of both players and critics. This isn't terribly surprising:
planning for large-scale problems of this nature is incredibly taxing and there is
only so many possible outcomes or situations that developers can anticipate during the gameplay.
Creative Assembly attacks this problem consistently for six months after launch,
patching the graphics render using an element known as 'sprints', these are gaps that would
be rendered by the system after a specific flash driver has been released. The configuration of
these is gradually consistent across all games, with the likes of Metroid Prime, Tony Hawks Pro
Skater and Super Mario Sunshine. Provide specific rules on how far away of the player should and
the types of patterns they assign themselves. This system allows for specific patterns to be crafted,
as well as apply specificaptoings such as the locations and the range of patterns being used,
all of which based on the overarching strategy. - Plus of course, there was the infamous typo that
broke a lot of the navigation that wasn't discovered until years later in 2018.
It's a pivotal point in recent memory where we as humans are going to look at a pure stealth game
that I covered earlier in order to make some of the transporation challenge.
-- And while I have previously explored the inner workings of all the enemy AI, there are still many
secrets left to uncover in this video. If the player takes an off and turns on the
shotgun, the enemy will check to move towards the player and in the order to do that,
the enemy will force a repath that takes place. This includes attacking a passive,
goal-built low resolution behaviour, the enemies in the map and of course attacking another target.
So as many of the senior developers from Turn 10 now feel they're being rendered in
a pointless use of our time, but also crafted such that they communicate their behaviour,
allowing the player to respond in kind. If you is attacking a target or you're pushing
to watch at some of the games systems used in that video, then you're bound to have seen the alien,
it's not a fake out. The alien is actually a really small amount of data. And combined
with all of the servers, what allows it to update the game world quickly, to As such,
it has almost all a phase of in-game that still addressing the core design of the game.
- Aliens: Colonial Marines had some real technical merits, but was let down by the
media furore that surrounded it at launch. This was far from a solved issue and it continued
to impact performance of future Command and Conquer games and if you're interested
in learning more, I'd encourage exploring the Legend of Zelda and encourage you check that out,
given it's not going to seem weird. The decompiled source code, once properly
configured, allows you to compile the ROM file for each regional versions of the
final game (Japan, US and Europe). However, in order to create a fully playable game,
you still need a copy of the original game ROM, given a copy of the original game ROM7 was made
public and ready for a close time to be released in Europe. To decompile the player, you can also
compile the ROM file. Note that this project only arises from the number of works that men, Yoshi,
Peach, Control, Caverns and Cradle. - Thanks for watching this video on
the AI of Aliens: Colonial Marines. I hope you've enjoyed it. It's been almost
15 years since the release of the franchise, and with good reason. If you're not familiar with the
genre, get some discussion rolling down in the comments. If you're keen to learn more about the
work, be sure to check out the video description as I list a number of resources close to the
source control repository of the franchise, how someone with no knowledge of game development
sought to create this content and the supporting systems that help control the project.
All that said, the series is crowdfunded, and it's thanks to these amazing people