Self-programming Games

We can't even make an AI that can beat a low-level master at Go, a very simple game with very explicit rules. What you describe does not exist in any non-trivial way, and will not exist in any non-trivial way for a long, long time.

You would need to design an AI with feelings and an ability to think. Once you have done that (The hard stuff) then you might be able to get an AI to design a computer game.

The $65,000 question is: Would you like the game the AI has written?

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Original post by radioteeth It seems like it could make for some interesting MMORPGs, even single-player RPGs could end up being very interesting for the player.

Current AI technologies may already enhance the player experience when used correctly. I didn't played to Oblivion yet, but their "Radiant AI" tech is pretty interesting. It is not very difficult to create a believable NPC socialization system (NPC speak to each other, spread rumors, buy/sell stuff based on their needs, and so on). AI Junkie has a very interesting article about agents and state machine - check out miner's bob example on page 2.

There are numerous AI techniques that can be used to enhance game play - and with today's hardware, games that take advantage of these techniques are likely to come.

Regards,

What you're talking about is procedural gaming. All in-game content being developed "on-the-fly" by the 'game' itself, to suit your own game style. Yes, it's being done. Look for the "Spore" video on google.

-Javin

Procedural content has been used for years -- most often in demoscene stuff (where you're trying to compete for a 4KB, 64KB or 96KB demo, you don't have much room to include memory-sapping textures) but also in a lot of other games. I've been researching it for quite some time but haven't had the chance to really make much of it. It is used substantially to generate the large expanses of world in MMORPGs from what I have heard.

The earliest example I can really think of in terms of commercial games would have to be Rescue on Fractalus and Elite on the old 8-bits. They used procedurally generated content to bypass the limited amount of memory on the machines. I'd be pretty sure that this continues way before the 8-bit home computers.

Artificially intelligent procedural content generation seems useless; my procedural content generation uses "dumb" systems like cellular automata and genetic programming to build something that looks good from a basic set of templates. The vagaries of natural language and quality storytelling are such that most human beings can't produce an engaging game plot and scenario (see: every second post in Help Wanted, or nearly any translated-to-English console RPG), and I don't believe in the possibility that we'll see anything capable of producing a decent game plot on its own for quite some time -- it will still require "faking it" for the most part (such as in emergent gameplay experiments like Facade).

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Original post by Javin What you're talking about is procedural gaming. All in-game content being developed "on-the-fly" by the 'game' itself, to suit your own game style. Yes, it's being done. Look for the "Spore" video on google. -Javin

Just a note. Spore uses "procedural" graphics, but they are essentailly just adaptive models and animations. The planets themself and surroundings are also auto-generated.

The gameplay itself is completely mechanical. While the presentation on google repeats "procedural" to the point of wearing the word off, it also demonstrates some manual aspects:

- Creatures are skinned meshes. Player can warp the nodes and body, but no more than one could do in any modeling package
- Creature movement is adaptive, but still based on skeletal animation. Given a skeletal body, it's a matter of finding ground contact points and moving extremities acording to some basic rules.
- Planets, landmass and universe itself is auto-generated
- Structures are modeled from blobs or similar elements, like many software modeling packages offer by the player
- AI is hard to judge from screenshots, but it embodies nothing more than harvest/conquer principles. There are interaction events, but those are not auto-generated, they are scripted.

The game is most impresive, and for the scope it offers amazing. I'm just trying to point out, that simply throwing some method of self-creating does not make a game. Elite 3 had universe made out of 1 billion stars. Each of these stars had unique name, planets, asteroid belts, bases, resources, etc. And the game was under 1Mb in size.
What spore does, is it blends the hand-crafted content with procedural content, in an effective matter. Of course, while the presentation looks great, the gameplay itself might be a complete letdown.

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Original post by Antheus What spore does, is it blends the hand-crafted content with procedural content, in an effective matter.

That sounds like the only way it could ever be done, partially designed and partially generated. Games have begun following this trend, I think they are headed to delve more deeply into such things.

Like the forests in Oblivion, they are generated, and the main reason behind that was that designers wanted large forests for the player to venture off into. It was simply more effective to figure out how to generate these forests than to assign it all as work to artists and modelers. This freed them up to do more of the hand-crafted content.

Now what if designers wanted a large city where you could go into every building?

That's a lot of modeling. It would only make sense to figure out how to generate a certain percentage of it. Again, it would require the blending of the hand-crafted content with the procedural content like Antheus says.

Diablo II

No, I'm serious.

There are alot of games that use randomly generated content (such as Diablo II and the great classic ToeJam and Earl) which use a set of rules to generate different worlds every time you play.

It's a simple AI, but an AI nonetheless. The "Pac-Man ghost" version of the AI game designer :)

Original post by radioteeth

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Original post by Antheus Like the forests in Oblivion, they are generated, and the main reason behind that was that designers wanted large forests for the player to venture off into. It was simply more effective to figure out how to generate these forests than to assign it all as work to artists and modelers. This freed them up to do more of the hand-crafted content.

Um, I'm vague on details, but I believe FS 200x uses procedural cities. It has "seeds" for different areas based on data obtained from real maps, and reconstructs buildings on top of sattelite imagery. This allows to create completely fake 3D buildings for, say, San Francisco, that fill the blanks between landmark buildings.

As I said before, main difference is, that completely procedural terrain is unapealing to a human. Even where generation is used, it's in a highly controlled manner. Dune 2 defined entire terrain using a 16-bit seed. At the same time, this seed was predefined, so that map was hand-checked before use for playability.

Diablo 1 and 2 also used random dungeons, but they were tightly controlled, with certain map parts being strictly predefined, just as they were in netchack and rogue.

The reason procedural is as dissatisfying as it may be is merely because of the techniques being used.

There are really as many ways of going about creating something as one can think up. I strongly believe that there is a lot of room for improving procedural techniques to eliminate the majority of annoyances that one finds in existing methods.

The algorithms being used for certain things just seem wrong to me. In reality, terrain isn't formed using perlin noise.

It's formed by a multitude of naturally occurring forces. Forces which one must approximate or emulate the effects of to produce realistic and interesting terrains.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster Quote: Original post by radioteeth The reason procedural is as dissatisfying as it may be is merely because of the techniques being used. There are really as many ways of going about creating something as one can think up. I strongly believe that there is a lot of room for improving procedural techniques to eliminate the majority of annoyances that one finds in existing methods. The algorithms being used for certain things just seem wrong to me. In reality, terrain isn't formed using perlin noise. It's formed by a multitude of naturally occurring forces. Forces which one must approximate or emulate the effects of to produce realistic and interesting terrains. May be so, but in reality there are many boring terrains.

YES!

A realistic terrain modeled by natural effects is not an AI game designer, it's a physical model. A set of procedures that can create terrain that improves gameplay... that's AI game design. And that's a totally different can of wormfeet.

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Original post by JBourrie A realistic terrain modeled by natural effects is not an AI game designer, it's a physical model. A set of procedures that can create terrain that improves gameplay... that's AI game design. And that's a totally different can of wormfeet.

Yeah, but with a few neural nets, some genetic to have them compete, and a week of training, a program could figure out that terrain 6289337 is so much more exciting than 17055 or 21883961. Then as the game is played you just feed back the amount of time the player spends on each terrain to continue to train the nets, and it should almost never fail at picking out exciting terrain.