BUILD | TECHNOLOGY // AI
enabling factor in particular is more and faster RAM. “This helps us manage a larger number of
AI characters and background creatures and to maintain more detailed information about each of them,” he says. “It also allows us to store more information about the game world, so that AIs can reason about bigger worlds and respond to them more accurately. “There is also potential to make use of
more CPU cores, especially on PC. AI is very suitable for offloading onto other cores, so it’s easier for AI to take advantage of this than, say, graphics.”
Top-to-bottom: Dan Greenawalt of Turn 10, Gilles Mazers of Masa Life, Matthew Jack of Moon Collider, Mieszko Zielinski of Epic, Mike Cook of Angelina and William Klein of Rival Theory
ARTIFICIAL CHANGES? However, Epic senior programmer Mieszko Zielinski says that, in his opinion, developers have already reached the maximum level of AI smartness in the first and third-person shooter genres, and further raising the bar could ruin the fun. He does say though that there is potential in using the cloud to offload AI computation power and, thus, improve intelligence in other genres, such as strategy or racing (see ‘Invasion of the car snatchers’), but believes this will require adjustments to the way AI is handled by game code.
INVASION OF THE CAR SNATCHERS
MICROSOFT IS USING a combination of its next-gen hardware and its cloud technology to power a new AI feature called Drivatar. Used by Turn 10 in Forza 5, the system is designed to emulate real human behaviour in opponent cars, using data gathered from real players. This means the AI tries to reflect how a player drives, such as how they drive in traffic and where they play aggressively. Depending on the player’s skill level, they can choose to race against
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the Drivatars of the game’s best drivers, or against slower opponents more suited to their skill level. The studio’s creative director Dan Greenawalt describes the tech as a “quantum leap in evolution from traditional AI opponents”, and says it wouldn’t be possible without the firm’s cloud technology. “With millions of Forza 5 players out there actively playing the game, that is a tremendous amount of data processing as players continue to
update their Drivatars on a regular basis,” says Greenawalt. “Offloading those computational processes to the cloud also has the positive side effect of freeing up that
extra power on the Xbox One itself, allowing us to use that power for our cutting-edging physics and graphics engines. We’ve really only begun to see what is possible with cloud computing in games. “Drivatar is a great testament to the power of the Xbox One and the cloud, but it’s far from the last one. In the coming years, we’ll continue to see talented developers from across the industry using this technology in tremendously exciting ways.”
“Cloud AI computations are a perfect fit for calculation-heavy strategy games. I can also imagine harnessing all that additional computation power to simulate rich worlds to a high detail for RPGs,” he explains.
The biggest challenge for us is
adapting how we think of AI and how we use it to drive experiences. William Klein, Rival Theory
“There’s a lot that could be done with cloud computing provided one doesn’t mind the additional preparation and data handling burden that comes with it.” Rival Theory CEO William Klein, whose firm offers free AI toolset Rain for creating AI-based characters in Unity, says it isn’t clear yet how useful such computations could be, but admits it does have potential. “Offloading AI to an external server is important if the problem your AI is solving requires lots of computation or large data sets. It isn’t clear that those are bottlenecks for better AI in games,” he states.
“We see the cloud opportunity as having more to do with connectivity and distribution. For example, our Sentio product makes heavy use of Microsoft’s cloud for managing AI lifetimes across games.”
A NEXT-GEN LEAP
Given that many games already offer seemingly intelligent foes and companions, will any advances in AI be clearly noticeable to players? After all, unlike graphics, the changes will not jump out to players in an instant. Jack says the biggest changes will be in how AI handles dynamic and physical worlds, allowing both enemies and player companions to handle changes to the environment created by the player, allowing for destructible environments, for example. “When you blow a hole in a wall or push a boulder, AI systems have to either recalculate their map of that area to respond, or do some very expensive querying of their surroundings all the time,” states Jack. “Either way, this was usually too expensive for last- gen consoles, but now it’s a pretty obvious use of the new power.
“Another leap we’ve just begun to see is to high-quality companion characters. These have been a long time coming. But games like The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite are
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