[HN Gopher] What was Radiant AI, anyway?
___________________________________________________________________
What was Radiant AI, anyway?
Author : paavohtl
Score : 137 points
Date : 2025-06-07 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.paavo.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.paavo.me)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| When will we get games that actually do do this? It's one of the
| things I'm actually excited about with AI.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm not sure about the limits of the engine's complexity, but
| the game "shadows of doubt", a procedurally generated murder
| mystery game, has a giant sandbox with characters that have
| jobs, partners, visit restaurants, and more.
|
| I don't think the NPCs can do more than a handful of actual
| actions, but the way you can find who a character met by
| watching the security tapes of a particular restaurant from a
| particular time because on of the bat's neighbours says "I saw
| this person here last night" when you ask about your murder
| victim is extremely impressive.
|
| There is definitely a sense that you've seen everything after a
| while because of the limitations of procedural generation, of
| course, but a sandbox like that combined with scripted quests
| would make for some really fun gameplay outside of the main
| quest.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| The Sims, Crusasder Kings, the new inzoi games all have this.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Honestly the big problem isn't the tech. The AI techniques you
| use most often are decades-old and well-known, LLMs don't
| really enter in to it except for generative dialogue.
|
| The problem is that except for in a handful of cases the idea
| is often more appealing than the reality.
| ednite wrote:
| Interesting read. Got me thinking, I'd love to see what happens
| when modern AI meets open world simulation. Not just prettier
| graphics, but actual reasoning NPCs. Imagine arguing with a World
| of Warcraft innkeeper about the price of ale. Priceless.
| Dzugaru wrote:
| Not possible, because can't be guardrailed with 100% accuracy.
| You'll ask it something outside of the Warcraft world (e.g. US
| politics), and it'll happily oblige. I imagine NPCs will
| generate really weird immersion breaking stuff even if you
| cannot freeform interact with them anyway.
|
| Not to mention the current token cost.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| You can do that also while playing a traditional tabletop
| RPG. Players typically don't do it because why would they
| ruin immersion?
|
| I understand that in multiplayer with strangers it would be a
| problem because you could affect other players' experiences,
| but in a single-player game I don't see this as a big issue,
| as long as the NPC doesn't spontaneously bring immersion-
| breaking topics into the conversation without the player
| starting it (which I suppose could be achieved with a
| suitable system prompt and some fine-tuning on in-lore text).
|
| If it's the player that wants to troll the game and break
| immersion by "jailbreaking" the NPCs, it's on them, just like
| if they use a cheat code and make the game trivial.
| jrowen wrote:
| It's still gonna be hallucinatory AI slop. For the same
| reasons it makes uninteresting quests and boring planets.
| It's lazy and it can't replace actual writing and art.
|
| AI is great for getting tasks done where you can pull the
| information you need out of the slop. For quality immersive
| entertainment it's not there.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Write a couple of lore books, in-universe cyclopedia, some
| character sheets and exclusively train on them. Maybe some
| out-of-game lore for cross-over universes!
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| Is that feasible? I was under the impression that fully
| training an LLM requires untold mountains of data, way more
| than a game dev company could reasonably create.
| c0redump wrote:
| You are correct. The fact that so many people are saying
| "lol just train it on text about the game bro" reveals
| how little people understand how these models work, how
| they are trained, etc.
| keyringlight wrote:
| The question that poses to me is the quantity of writing
| you need for training before you can reasonably expect a
| generation system to produce something new and interesting,
| however much work on the right knowledge is in the right
| place, and is worth the costs for how you expect the player
| to interact with the game beyond the manual work.
|
| I doubt there's telemetry in the elder scrolls games, but
| I'd love to know how many go around the world exploring
| everything the characters have to say, or reading all the
| books. How many get the lore in secondary media, wikis or
| watching a retelling or summary on youtube. On a certain
| level it's important they're there as an opt-in method to
| convey the 'secondary' world lore to the player without a
| "sit down and listen" info dump, plus give the impression
| it was written by someone so these objects would would
| exist organically in the world or certain characters would
| talk about those topics, but I wonder how much of the
| illusion would still be there if it was just each book
| having a title.
| sirtaj wrote:
| For this to work you pretty much have to start from
| scratch, putting in "obvious" things like "the sun exists
| and when its out it casts light and shadow" and "water is a
| liquid (what's a liquid?) and flows downhill". Is there a
| corpus of information like this, but also free of facts
| that might be anachronistic in-universe?
| brookst wrote:
| I'm not at all sure of this. You can use classifiers, fine
| tuning, and prompting to mitigate the issue both on user
| input and model output. And you'd probably want a bunch of
| fine tuning anyway to get their voice right.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > Not to mention the current token cost.
|
| Games is one place where running local LLM's is a no-brainer.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Just train a model on actual game content
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Not possible, because can't be guardrailed with 100%
| accuracy. You'll ask it something outside of the Warcraft
| world (e.g. US politics), and it'll happily oblige. I imagine
| NPCs will generate really weird immersion breaking stuff even
| if you cannot freeform interact with them anyway.
|
| > Not to mention the current token cost.
|
| You of course have to train the AI from ground up and on
| material that is as much as possible only related to the
| topics that are in the game world (i.e. don't include real-
| world events in the training data that has no implications
| in-universe).
| c0redump wrote:
| How much text about the game world do you have? Does this
| amount compare favorably to the volume of text required to
| train an LLM?
|
| Answer those two questions and you will realize why your
| idea doesn't work.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| You don't, for example, expect some ordinary farmer or
| tramp in the game world to know a lot about the (in-game)
| world or be capable of doing deep conversations about
| complicated topics.
|
| So I don't think the necessary amount of text that you
| need to train the AI on is as insanely large as you
| imagine (but of course nevertheless _a lot_ of texts have
| to be written - this is the price of having "much more
| dynamic" AI characters in the game).
| anonzzzies wrote:
| and the place where hallucinations can be a feature instead of
| a bug
| thrance wrote:
| I enjoy getting my ale at the click of a button, and keep my
| arguing capabilities for stranger online.
|
| There may be a place for AI driven games but there is literally
| no reason to shove it everywhere. Pre-written dialogue is much
| more enjoyable to engage with on the long term, contrasted with
| having to think about phrasing for an NPC that spouts generic
| fantasy speak.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Wiring a chatbot to dialogue is less interesting to me than the
| possibility of AI directing scenes and orchestrating reactivity
| across multiple characters. A reasoning model can ensure that
| the world responds to the player in a reasonable and
| narratively interesting way, without having to script
| everything or make individual characters particularly
| intelligent.
|
| We're used to thinking of game AI as a property of the entity
| it's attached to (the NPC, the enemy, the opposing player) but
| an LLM can sit above that, more like a dungeon master.
| starkparker wrote:
| Wasn't this the goal of the Director AI in Left 4 Dead?[1]
| Monitoring player progress (or lack of it) and tailoring how
| zombies and items spawned outside of script events, and in
| L4D2 how the map, pathing, and weather worked in order to
| maximize tension or encourage progress?
|
| 1: https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director
| weitendorf wrote:
| After playing Starfield I don't really have any expectations for
| Bethesda to deliver on anything interesting anymore. The
| progression from Oblivion to Starfield has been one of becoming
| less like a small shop with character willing for its developers
| to take big risks with unique and intricate features, and more of
| trying to be a generic AAA studio that prefers predictable
| blandness. I don't think you can really hope that they'll
| magically return to making games the way they did 20 years ago.
|
| They seem to now be under the mistaken impression that radiant AI
| is to get more content out of the game by implementing infinite
| permutations of simple quests, and that customers will think X
| things permuted Y ways is X*Y content and not just X+Y content.
| But the purpose of radiant AI was, I think, to make the world
| feel alive and even unique. Which means I really shouldn't even
| see every x in X or every y in Y.
|
| If you want an interesting implementation of the same concepts as
| in Radiant AI I recommend checking out Dwarf Fortress. Every
| dwarf fortress world is essentially an entire history of
| thousands of radiant AI interactions up until you enter it, at
| which point your adventurer/fort becomes part of the world and
| continues the radiant interactions with its
| civilizations/wildlife/monsters/etc.
|
| I think DF is probably the ideal existing game to considering
| adding LLM-characters and conversation to as a drop-in
| augmentation. DF already has the simulation and generation of
| realistic characters and stories working, but unfortunately it's
| very formulaic to interact with it as an adventurer. In that case
| the game actually is quite "alive" already, just without a voice.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Maybe through a mod. Hard to imagine Tarn would have any
| interest involving LLMs.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Yes. IMO Starfield's biggest failure is in the creative
| department. It is not interesting at all (for me) in terms of
| things like writing and voice acting etc. It is not a technical
| problem that can solved by innovative game mechanics like a
| roided up version of radiant AI (whatever that is).
|
| Games like RDR2 and Witcher 3 left such a mark on me becauss
| they had bold personalities. Starfield in comparison feels like
| corporate memphis despite a nice Nasapunk foundation.
| holoduke wrote:
| And dont forget Mass Effect series.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Ha. I just finished replaying ME2. I could never imagine
| someone like Jack or Grunt or (my beloved) Legion in
| Starfield.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| To me, Starfield is a massive admission that either the
| developers don't understand what made their previous games work
| - or that no one will step in at a top level and prevent them
| breaking that core.
|
| The modern TES games have been all about environmental
| storytelling, exploration, combat and crafting. All else is
| secondary.
|
| Whether you like that focus or not is up to you, but that's the
| draw of games like Skyrim and FO4.
|
| But Starfield completely broke it. They wanted hundreds of
| planets to explore, but the only practical way to do that is
| procedural generation. No one wants to explore procedural
| spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't
| do environmental storytelling because that requires a human
| hand.
|
| Due to engine limitations, making all the travel seamless was
| also completely impractical.
|
| So instead of seeing a location and going "Oh man, I want to go
| _there_! ", then just walking there encountering distractions
| on the way...it's Loading screen -> Loading Screen -> Loading
| screen -> Generic planet with nothing interesting to see.
|
| How no one at a top level said "this can't work, the game's
| concept is bad, start over" is baffling. No one had a vision at
| the top level for how the game was supposed to work - or that
| vision was just wrong.
|
| If Bethesda can't understand the fundamentals of their own
| best-selling game, I don't see how they can make a sequel.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| Proc gen can be engaging if emergent content is complex,
| dynamic, and novel. But again that goes back to Radiant AI
| being a vessel for generic fetch quests in the newer games,
| while in a proc gen game you would think there would be a
| major, if not _the_ major dev focus on fleshing out the
| system in other ways (from dynamic tribes and factions to
| more fully fleshed out STALKER-esque persistent fellow space
| travellers with agency). The final missing component would be
| inspiration in design of the pieces, so they interact
| together in interesting but emergent ways, which is of course
| another element that the game sorely lacks.
| hibikir wrote:
| Bethesda had been doing procedural generation since forever
| though: Have you played Daggerfall? It's always been part of
| their studio's DNA.
|
| Bethesda has always relied on top of the line technological
| innovation that makes us forgive all the jank that came with
| it. Whether it was a bad combat system, a level scaling
| mechanism that just doesn't work, uncanny graphics... this
| has always been there. It's the opposite of the old Nintendo
| Way, where the games always were less ambitious, but had so
| much polish that the games counted as mirrors.
|
| We've reached a moment of much diminished returns though. 5,
| or even 10 year old games aren't so technologically inferior
| that they are uncomfortable. A very shiny things has more
| trouble covering for jank, and high budget games are just so
| expensive that neither coherent vision. nor significant
| innovation are likely. So the Bethesda way is just not
| workable anymore.
|
| What I'd want Bethesda to do, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the
| Kingdom meets Morrowind/Oblivion, is just really hard to
| wrangle logistically. Getting anything done under those kinds
| of constraings just takes too long.
| weitendorf wrote:
| Procedural generation is fine. But you can definitely see
| that Starfield was intended to be a platform for user-
| generated content straight from the start, and I think they
| must have convinced themselves that they didn't really need
| to care too much about the game itself, because those
| chumps - sorry, players - would add all the content for
| them on their own. It's like Metaverse all over again. They
| forgot they actually needed to make something worth playing
| and users' time investment before it would become a money
| printing machine. Also, probably like 4 people who worked
| on Daggerfall still work at Bethesda and most of their
| games between then and now didn't use procedural generation
| much at all, so I don't understand why so many people make
| this argument. Like oh it's normal for me to put DSLs in my
| software projects, here check out this git repo I worked on
| 25 years ago when I was in college, our customers should
| have been prepared for the shit job I did with it this
| time.
|
| Actually, I think I would be completely fine with Bethesda
| just churning out TES POI and storylines without trying to
| do anything significantly more complicated than what they
| did in Skyrim. Just focus on the world building and the
| story and do some simple gimmick that's a little more
| creative than "shouts/dragonborn but in space". I suspect
| most other players would be happy with something of similar
| scope.
| fabian2k wrote:
| That is a major issue with Starfield, but it also felt like
| Bethesda missed the improvements happening in other games in
| the last decade or so. Many games now are much more cinematic
| in their storytelling, often with full motion capture. A very
| recent comparison would be BG3, which is very cinematic
| despite being almost impossibly large.
|
| In Starfield you have a mostly static view of your
| questgivers talking. Which was fine 10-20 years ago, doesn't
| feel as engaging today when many games do it much better.
|
| It's also not only about this aspect, you can make engaging
| stories with old-school methods. But the writing could not
| save the aging presentation here, it appeared very bland and
| tired to me.
|
| What absolutely didn't help was the persuasion minigame,
| where you essentially broke all pretense of having a story-
| based reason to bypass a certain check. Persuasion checks are
| very common in RPGs, I've never seen them done so terribly as
| in Starfield.
|
| The environmental storytelling certainly was the highlight of
| previous Bethesda games. But the main and side stories often
| were engaging as well. In Starfield they felt aggressively
| bland and mediocre in a way I haven't really seen in other
| games.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| They've _always_ been terrible at animation. 10 or 20 years
| ago, their animations have always been the absolute worst
| by any contemporary standard (the art used to be too - see
| Battlespire for some terrible art - but they improved it).
| Maybe part of that was because of the engine, but I think
| they just never had the culture for it.
|
| They clearly did try to improve their animations in Fallout
| 4 in 2013-2014, which is the timeframe the most development
| happened, so it's not like they're oblivious to their
| biggest shortcoming as a studio. So what they did in F76
| and Starfield is just a regression.
| ijk wrote:
| > No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never
| anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental
| storytelling because that requires a human hand.
|
| I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the
| development effort to make them interesting enough to
| explore.
|
| In my view, you can either use procgen to make development
| cheaper _or_ to make it more interesting to explore, but not
| both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented
| because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by
| their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.
|
| But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting
| to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.
|
| Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so
| that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with
| procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different
| systems interacting; having a sword with different stats
| feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay
| effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that
| integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a
| system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your
| reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot
| more to explore.
|
| Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden
| reactions that let different parts of the content work
| together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down
| the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has
| discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving
| parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt
| can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets
| you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to
| swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the
| game as the chair (with rocket launchers).
|
| They've all got a lot of interesting environmental
| storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to
| work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop
| at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to
| make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough
| for the players to care.
| avereveard wrote:
| Case in point: dwarf fortress. Every world is
| procedural,and woven with interesting stories
|
| https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Cacame_Awemedinade
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never
| anything interesting in them.
|
| I mostly agree, though at least for me Minecraft was a game I
| loved exploring in despite it all being generated
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never
| anything interesting in them.
|
| I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure
| procedural generation and people love wandering through
| Minecraft worlds.
|
| I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the
| difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in
| Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things.
| Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come
| across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted
| my time by just wandering around a map.
|
| Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not
| having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft
| is, probably not so much for Starfield.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of folks even here will not play DF.
| If you want them to play a DF like game, talk about rimworld
| please!
| tumsfestival wrote:
| RimWorld is only superficially comparable to Dwarf Fortress,
| if you want to talk about basic gameplay then sure, but what
| makes the latter special is the immensely complex world
| simulations and interactions going on in the background,
| RimWorld has absolutely nothing like that.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I'd be surprised if the majority is overwhelming since DF has
| sold a million copies on Steam so far. For comparison,
| Civilization V has sold about 10M.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Games have a similar lifecycle to social scenes. Now and again,
| an amazing game comes along that captures the imagination of
| gamers. Usually it's made by really creative and innovative
| people with a clear vision and direction. Also these people
| usually have _taste_ , which is a crucial element.
|
| Their good taste attracts a bunch of early adopters, people
| with a finger on the pulse and who are eager to play and
| appreciate the game for what it is. But this interest attracts
| poseurs, people who play the game but just to say they are, to
| feel included and a part of something cool. There are far more
| poseurs than otherwise, so at this stage the scene can grow
| exponentially. This growth attracts vultures commoditize the
| scene in the form of penny pinching and "enshitification"
| through dark patterns. Monied interests strip out everything
| that made the game interesting and fun (because a good, fun
| experience isn't profitable), and then they milk it for
| everything it's worth until it's a dried corpse. These are the
| people who are driving the bad gameplay decisions and who
| aren't listening to the taste makers.
|
| Usually in games this comes in the form of a pivot to MMOs. By
| that measure, TES died in 2014.
|
| IMO this also applies to Final Fantasy (RIP 2010, plenty of new
| FF games but nothing that recaptured the magic of 6 and 7) and
| Warcraft (RIP 2004, no new warcraft games since).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Reminds me how more people play oldschool runescape than the
| newer version. Anytime jagex tries to implement some change
| to that game they poll the community forums. Seems to work
| alright for keeping people around.
| sesm wrote:
| * from Morrowind to Starfield
|
| Oblivion was a big step back from Morrowind: generic art style,
| map markers, no deep story.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| The funny thing about using AI to create an infinite amount of
| bland quests is that there is literally no audience for it. The
| people who play the game through once or twice aren't going to
| care about it and the people who want more of the game will
| download one of the thousands of mods created by the community.
| Oh, wow, you used AI to come up with a quest where I have to go
| to a cave and kill a creature. Amazing.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| I think Starfield gets a lot more flak than it deserves. Yeah,
| compared to Fallout 4, where there's something hand placed to
| observe or interact with seemingly every 100 ft in any
| direction, the world feels barren. But I think the departure is
| intentional; Starfield felt much more like a spiritual
| successor to Daggerfall than to anything since Morrowind.
| Overall, I spent less time in Starfield than in older Bethesda
| titles, but I liked what was there, despite it being less
| dense, and I spent more time than I have in many other games.
|
| Why should Bethesda have to refine the same exact formula over
| and over? That would just turn into what Ubisoft does with
| Assassins Creed, pumping out soulless entry after entry into
| the franchise. In other words, Starfield _was_ Bethesda taking
| a risk and trying to introduce unique features rather than
| releasing yet another another predictable "Bethesda RPG".
| vkou wrote:
| > Why should Bethesda have to refine the same exact formula
| over and over?
|
| Because they are the only ones who can pull off that formula,
| and when they stray from it, they end up as just one mediocre
| title in a sea of similar mediocrity.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Perhaps Starfield was the most important Bethesda release.
| The animus toward Starfield will serve as an enormous
| signal/reminder to course correct away from this "unique
| feature." One can hope.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Don't wait on Bethesda to deliver. Try Enderal. Your
| expectations will be fully met.
| dedicate wrote:
| I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical conversation
| with a blacksmith.
|
| I just want to see that blacksmith close up shop early because
| he's feuding with the town guard, or give me a discount because
| his daughter just won the local archery competition. I want a
| world that reacts to itself, not just to me.
|
| The goal shouldn't be to make NPCs that can pass the Turing test,
| but to make a world that feels like it has a pulse.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| >I don't actually want to have a deep, philosophical
| conversation with a blacksmith.
|
| You didn't read the article, that's not what Radiant AI did.
| This is from twenty years ago and has nothing to do with LLMs.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It doesn't need to be a deep philosophical conversation. You
| could be striking up a "buy now pay later" business deal or
| asking him to produce a specific type of equipment according to
| your specifications, etc.
| TillE wrote:
| Agreed, that's the real dream of open world RPGs: dynamic
| worlds. Perhaps modern AI techniques can help in that a bit,
| but what you really need is an incredibly intricate simulation.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Do you really want that in a scrolls game though? I want the
| blacksmith to be first npc in the town, more or less always
| there, with 1 button on the dialog tree to get to the shop menu
| for me to unload an entire dungeon of loot onto this
| blacksmith. And he better have ore and leather strips.
| nxobject wrote:
| And I want to be able to game player statistics using a
| combination of spells and potions so I can pickpocket the
| blacksmith and then sell their stuff back at marked-up
| prices. The traditional RPG numbers-and-skills-and-formulas
| part of TES was a great joy to exploit.
| supermatt wrote:
| It's entirely possible that Radiant AI in its entirety is
| actually in the original oblivion and the remaster.
|
| It's just that they either forgot to enable the build flag, or
| part of their production release is to pick a random commit as
| gold master.
|
| As people had already parted with their money it's been given the
| same priority as the game breaking bugs - which is to say it was
| left for the community to fix.
|
| Maybe they will put out a "hotfix" in another 15 years to enable
| it.
|
| I strongly believe that no bethesda employee has ever played a
| release version of their games.
| paavohtl wrote:
| Radiant AI is in Oblivion and every game they've made since
| then. There's nothing to enable. The issue is primarily with
| the game content; it's used all over the place, but in the
| final game it's not very impactful.
| supermatt wrote:
| By "in its entirety" I mean as it was promoted and originally
| demoed. The release version is vastly different to the pre-
| release demos (some are linked in the article)
| paavohtl wrote:
| Yes, I wrote the article. I wouldn't say the system in the
| release version is vastly different to the pre-release demo
| (there was only one to my knowledge, the E3 2005 one), as
| that just demonstrates a tightly scripted sequence of
| events, which one of the developers was open about even
| before Oblivion was released. Some things about the system
| definitely changed (such as disallowing NPCs to pickpocket
| from the player), but I don't think we have any evidence of
| whole systems or major behaviors that were actually
| implemented at some point and cut before release.
| supermatt wrote:
| Thanks, I enjoyed reading the article.
|
| That said, I'm pretty sure that they said the e3 demo
| wasn't scripted (edit: the quote in your article confirms
| it, too).
|
| We were expecting, at the time, a game like in the demos.
| But as you stated, it's probably more content related, in
| that they didn't actually schedule much (or any) complex
| combinations of those packaged behaviours or npc2npc
| interactions as shown in the demos - leaving only simple
| instances of the packages you described. Maybe the
| dependency chain of goals has some concrete limit, for
| example.
|
| It's mostly just "go here", "find food", "eat food",
| "sleep" (which I suppose emulates life, but isn't what we
| were expecting).
|
| Although I guess that the amount/complexity of wrangling
| the behaviours of 1000 (???) npcs to stop the game being
| unplayable due to goals being destroyed is why it's just
| so passive in its release form.
| paavohtl wrote:
| There's another quote which explains what they meant by
| "it's not scripted": it's not using their (text-based)
| scripting language, but the entire sequence is more or
| less 100% deterministic, using AI packages to control the
| behavior:
|
| > The reason it's AI and not scripting is because it uses
| goals and rules to determine how something is going to be
| accomplished.
|
| > In the sense that it's a sequence of events that happen
| in a particular order, you might consider it scripted,
| but the way you set up those events, and how the actors
| accomplish them, is not scripted.
| supermatt wrote:
| I was referring to you saying above that the e3 demo was
| "tightly scripted". I never suggested it was, just that
| it was much more complex than what was released.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The closest thing we got to the idea of Radiant AI is probably
| Dwarf Fortress.
|
| But entirely goal-driven (and thus unpredictable) game AI systems
| like this are usually at odds with story-driven gameplay where
| the outcome needs to be deterministic (or at least "winnable")
| and the player is the hero which the story is built around (while
| games like Dwarf Fortress don't have a pre-defined story, and
| also no player character to take care of, and the whole fortress
| being wiped out because of comically unpredictable events is a
| large part of the "fun").
| gmueckl wrote:
| That was also my thought. How does the world behave 100 hours
| into the simulation? If half the town residents have managed to
| get themselves killed by guards and some of the shopkeepers are
| gone, it's a bad outcome. Complex sims have emergent behaviors
| that are hard to tune.
|
| The other thing is a bit more subtle. It's a big open world and
| all NPCs need to be active continuously for that sim to work.
| So you have a big N to squeeze into a tight per frame CPU
| budget. Also, things like path planning or object interaction
| only work if some information like object positions and
| pathfinding maps are kept in memory the whole time for the
| entire world. This sounds very challenging on a 2005 era PC.
| nxobject wrote:
| There's probably some mathematical way to express that... it'd
| be interesting to look at Todd's mythical "Radiant Economy",
| create a dynamical system model/game-theoretic mode, and try to
| prove that in the long run everyone doesn't end up broke or a
| millionaire.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > create a dynamical system model/game-theoretic mode, and
| try to prove that in the long run everyone doesn't end up
| broke or a millionaire.
|
| Simply ask yourself which factors in the real world lead or
| don't lead (depending on your political stance) to this
| outcome, and you likely have found the relevant factors that
| you have to include.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| To be fair, the velocity of money can be be significantly
| higher in a video game, and you're much less likely to have
| innovations reshuffling the market. It seems inevitable
| that extremal states would be more prevalent than real
| life.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| With the point "the velocity of money can be be
| significantly higher in a video game" you actually
| outlined a serious problem (and a potential solution):
|
| The rest of the in-game economy (including its pricing)
| doesn't fit the money circulation velocity, thus we get
| problems.
|
| The famous equation of exchange
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_exchange
|
| gives a rule of thumb how other factors of the in-game
| economy need to be adjusted if the velocity of money is
| increased.
| jadbox wrote:
| Some of the Ultima games (and I think Morrowind) had a kind of
| simulated life routine: sleeping, opening shop, visiting
| family, exploring, etc.
| paavohtl wrote:
| Some games in the Ultima series did, but Morrowind didn't,
| which is why Radiant AI was developed in the first place. The
| first chapter of the article is about that.
| netruk44 wrote:
| What an amazingly well researched and interesting post. I'm very
| grateful to the author for having done the legwork to research
| all of this.
|
| I loved how they were able to peel back the Todd Howard reality
| distortion field to really understand how Bethesda went from that
| famous E3 2005 demo to what we got in the end.
| paavohtl wrote:
| Thanks for your kind words! Researching and writing this
| consumed most of my free time for about two weeks, but I think
| it was worth it.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I have remembered the phrase "Radiant AI" from the Oblivion
| Marketing when it came out, 2005ish I guess, when I was in high
| school. I'm glad it stuck with someone else as much as it did for
| me: the hype, the disappointment, but also the wondering what it
| could have been, because it sounded like a legitimately very-cool
| game feature except for the part where it didn't exist.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| When I played gothic, I was in the wilderness and in the process
| of being killed by some beast. Completely unexpected, a core NPC
| (Lester?) joined the fight and slew it. It turns out, he makes a
| walk between 2 camps every day, and happened to be around just at
| the right time.
|
| While already impressed by the AI, I was blown away by this l
| behaviour. He goes between 2 places that can't exist in RAM at
| the same time, and interacts with the world when it happens to
| pop into existence around him.
|
| Radiant AI should and could have been like this.
| paavohtl wrote:
| Radiant AI does work exactly like that. The game keeps the
| global cell-level pathfinding graph in memory at all times, and
| uses it to simulate NPC travel outside of the loaded area.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Technology wise they should be comparable, but the way its
| used feels different. The Gothic world felt much more alive
| than Oblivion, even if Gothic is from 2001 and Oblivion from
| 2006
| nxobject wrote:
| > "Hail."
|
| > "I have heard that the Nords of Skyrim have been warring with
| the Redoran of Morrowind."
|
| > "It seems that these are turbulent times in the land of the
| Dunmer."
|
| > "Stop talking!"
|
| > "Take care"
| nxobject wrote:
| After hearing the "everyone pickpockets everyone and goes to jail
| and/or dies" anecdote for the "original" Radiant AI, I'm
| beginning to suspect that the following are incompatible:'
|
| - there's always enough interesting characters to interact with
| to give quests etc.;
|
| - live simulated world with emergent behavior that involves
| characters disappearing;
|
| - no one enters or leaves town.
| devstar wrote:
| As a Bethesda fan (spending 1000s of hours combined in Fallout
| and Skyrim), I enjoyed reading this post. Especially liked the
| use of creating your own NPC to test the various scenarios. I
| just now started playing the Oblivion remaster for the first time
| and I find that I am liking the NPC interactions / liveliness a
| lot more compared to their later titles.
|
| The one item that stood out to me was: "Todd's mid-fight dagger
| acquisition Verdict: Impossible in the final game unless scripted
| to do so"
|
| I do not disagree with the verdict for the final build of the
| game but I recall observing something similar in Fallout 3. I had
| stashed a mini-nuke launcher and ammmo in the Megaton player
| home. Some sort of conflict transpired (do not remember what
| exactly, perhaps I provoked an NPC for fun), I witnessed one of
| the town-folk run into my player home (in its own cell) and come
| back out with my weapon. It is possible with 1000s of hours in
| Bethesda games I am just mishmashing memories together but I am
| pretty sure this is what prompted me to eventually download a
| player home mod (and eventually learn G.E.C.K. by "remastering"
| it).
| paavohtl wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| It's an interesting anecdote, but from my understanding of the
| system that simply shouldn't be possible. Your house's interior
| cell isn't loaded into memory when you are outside in Megaton,
| so there's no way for the NPC to access your items. I think
| this fundamental limitation holds true for every version of the
| engine, from Morrowind to Starfield, but I'd be glad to be
| proven wrong with concrete evidence.
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