March 25th Update

[Springheel]

Real people don't stare straight ahead at nothing for long periods of time, turn exactly 90 degrees every ten seconds, or always take 24.5 seconds to complete their circuit of the hallways. Thief AI (with the exception of the occasional pathfindinging error) did--that's part of the automaton behaviour you were complaining about. By adding in behaviour that real people might do--looking from side to side, occasionally stopping to glance out a window, walking over to a fireplace to warm up for a minute, etc--we're making the AI act in a more believable way. However, since it's behaviour that the player can't necessarily predict (just like real life) then it makes the game more challenging.

 

Having a slider allows the player to balance things to their taste.

[Ishtvan]

I hate to stir up the age-old debate of player slider vs. FM author decision, but it seems like this could be handled by FM author decision. If the FM author wants their FM to be ghostable, they know not to set the AI who patrols through a long brightly lit hallway to look over their shoulder every second. But, they might want to set up a challenging situation where you have to break into a door at the side of an AI who is looking from side to side occasionally, with some predictability in the pattern (i.e., always look to one side then the other, hold the look for at least 3 seconds, maybe more). It would be kind've cheap if the player could just bypass this challenge by turning down the "look around" slider. I guess you could make a distinction between completely random looking and scripted looking.

[sparhawk]

That's why we said that he slider can only make it tougher, but not easier. And even it it would become easier, it would still be the players choice.

[AtariThief]

It might be fun to see the AI actually react to missing guards. Hey, if I can make enough of them dissappear without being seen maybe they'll even freak out. Maybe based on certain circumstances the guards will chat over recent happinings.

[Domarius]

...if they notice a fellow guard gone missing, they ask the nearest guard or the next one they see about him, and if they get say, 3 negative replies from other guards they report to whatever central guard station is available on the map so all the guards know, and if more than say, 3 guards go missing in this way, the whole map is on high alert, and things like if they find a body, they block all the main exits from the building, or things like calling in the city watch when they discover a murder. If you kill someone and it's discovered, 5 minutes later you'll have a bunch of extra city watch elite (or some equivalent depending on the map) roaming around and all the regular guards will be blocking every exit and be on high alert.

That kind of scenario would be my ideal Thief game. I think we were shooting for this sort of thing with the "highest emergency" alert level, from which AI never come down from. Seeing a dead body, seeing the thief himself, etc. trigger this. This alert level causes that AI to seek help and alert other AI. Something like that.

[oDDity]

Yes, basically you might think of it as what a multiplayer game of Thief might be like, except not quite, the guards behave like real guards, not players pretending to be guards, and there's quite a difference.

[Gildoran]

I think it'd be interesting to have levels where if any of the guards or the loot goes missing, the map triggers everybody to panic. For something like a museum, that could provide a realistic reason to "case the joint". I also completely agree with Ishtvan's concerns... in fact, I worry that even turning up the difficulty sliders might make things easier in certain situations (e.g. being able to lure guards into dark alleys from further away).

[oDDity]

This is the whole crux of the issue.

You can never stop players exploiting the AI, and this, in the end, is what all games come down to - the player learning and then exploiting the weaknesses and limitations of the AI. That is how the game is won or lost no matter what you do to stop it.

However, I don't think this should stop you from trying to program AI that behave realistically in response to the player actions.

I'd rather have that, than a paper/stone/scissors type of scenario, where everything might be fairly balanced, but quite unrealistic.

Games are boring. I want a realism simulator.

[sparhawk]

If you want that, then why not stop playing computer games and do the real thing? A simulation is always a simulation. If a simulation becomes as real as the real thing it will be the real thing.

[Crispy]

Probably because he wants the thrill of outsmarting "people" without the consequences of actually stealing.

 

I can see the attraction in that. Sometimes, though, I just want to play a game.

[slavatrumpevitch]

all these suggested changes to improve the realism sound really good to me. But i just want to make sure of one thing, they mostly refer only to the hardest difficulty levels, right? I think players should have the option to play on easy difficulty settings with T:TDP-ish AI (well, maybe a little improved from that)

[oDDity]

If you want that, then why not stop playing computer games and do the real thing? A simulation is always a simulation. If a simulation becomes as real as the real thing it will be the real thing.

 

 

You might well have hit a wok with a spanner to make that point.

If you don't already know the difference between a good simulation and doing the real thing in this case, then there's no point wasting time explaining to you.

Of course, the bottom line is that the coders here simply don't have the ability or knowledge to create the AI for such a simulation, and it's that impotence that makes you upset and defensive about it.

[New Horizon]

...it's that impotence...

 

We finally come to the root of oDD's frustrations. I hear Ginseng has helped many a man oDD...don't be afraid.

[SneaksieDave]

Undercover was just soooo much fun. Do one thing to trigger anyone, and basically the whole map goes ballistic, alarms, AI running around nonstop, etc.

 

The AI in Thief are artificially dumbed down to some extent, of course, to keep it:

1. playable

2. non-tedious

3. enjoyable

 

If ultra-hardcore-realism is going to be supported, that's great and I'll enjoy it myself at times, but the normal Thief-type of AI better be too, or there's going to be a lot (more) angry gamers (than just those in this thread).

 

There's a reason besides lack of time that I still have 400+ FMs to try. Many of them are not gameplay balanced well at all, making them tedious and frankly just annoying. It's a major turn-off toward playing further. Games need to remain enjoyable.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

I'm not participating in these discussions only because I think atmosphere is the most important element of an FM, and ambients and AI are all part of a bigger thing, not so important on their own.

[sparhawk]

If you don't already know the difference between a good simulation and doing the real thing in this case, then there's no point wasting time explaining to you.

 

Maybe you should thjink about what "simulation" means. It's a simulation because it's NOT the real thing. If you would perfectly mimic each and every issue of the real thing with a 100% accuracy, it wouldn't be a simulation anymore because it would have exactl the same consequences as the real thing has.

[Gildoran]

At the same time, a simulation may become useless if it strays too far from the behavior it seeks to model. It can easily be argued that when a guard doesn't panic upon finding body, the simulation is doing a poor job.

[sparhawk]

A guard that panics just because it finds a body might not in the right business.

[oDDity]

I'm not asking for virtual humans to be coded down to the last brain cell, that's not possible, but that doesn't mean you can't try to program in the main branches of realistic responses that a human might have, rather than resorting to typical gamey responses.

The irony in a Thief-like game is, that if you play the game well, ghost though a map, then the AI are never actually used at all, no matter how realistic they are.

You actually have to mess up or mess around to get any value from the realistic AI.

Wanting realistic responses from the AI is not just an underhanded way of making the game more difficult though, it's just that AI behaving in a realistic manner does tend make things more challenging by default, but also adds more longevity and replayability to the game.

The AI is always the weakest point in games like this or RPGs like Oblivion. You quickly work out their long list of weaknesses and limitations, see their repetitive and predictable behaviour, and the game ceases to have any value.

I guess that in maybe 10 years time the AI in games might be up to a reasonable standard, but currently it's quite pathetic, and that goes for all games, I'm not just picking on Thief.

[sparhawk]

The major problem with believable AI is that they would need to have a realistic modelling of their responses and beheaviour. But to implement something like this, you would need a selflearning system, because with any predetermined behaviour, you will always run into limits. But self learning systems are much slower. After all, it took you at about eight to ten years to learn a comprehensive set of rules how to behave and form models that give you a sufficient variety, and not even then are you finished. A ten year old human is still not really considered to be fully developed though. Of course, since an AI is tailored for a specific task, it doesn't need all that knowledge completely, but if you try to model a realistic human, then you need much more knowledge what it is about to be a human, then just telling it how to perform guard duties. And that's your complaint. We can not give them proper knowledge, because we neither have the time nor the machine capacity. Heck, we can't even properly program models that don't have clipping problems in a hundred percent of cases, because this already exceeds the performance that we need to achieve. Much less complex decisions in unknown situations.

[ZylonBane]

What this all comes down to is that real-world burglaries are committed either by armed gunmen who kill anything in their way, or individuals who spend weeks scoping out and researching their target (casing the joint, so to speak).

 

The Thief conceit of "Here's a building you've never been in before, you're all by yourself, and your weapons suck" is fundamentally incompatible with reality. A real person in the situations presented by most Thief levels would be caught, slaughtered, or forced to retreat.

 

Thus, realism in guard behavior not only should not, but CANNOT be the highest design goal. The result would be unplayable.

[oDDity]

Bollocks (as usual)

The vast majority of burglaries today, and in the past are carried out by individuals who are not armed with anything other than maybe a crowbar to open a window, or a knife if they're deranged, and they do not do any interior casing of the joint, just some external casing, finding out how many people are there at what times, security measures, likely ways in etc.

Given that our player has a large arsenal of weapons and tools at his disposal which no real thief would have, I think that this offsets any realism or intelligence the AI may display.

At the end of the day, it's still going to be the real human brain of the player against the coded and limited wits of the AI, so the advantage is always going to be with the player.

[ZylonBane]

Bollocks (as usual)

The vast majority of burglaries today, and in the past are carried out by individuals who are not armed with anything other than maybe a crowbar to open a window, or a knife if they're deranged, and they do not do any interior casing of the joint, just some external casing, finding out how many people are there at what times, security measures, likely ways in etc.

The vast majority of burglaries today are of buildings the size of which would comprise about a 2-minute Thief level. I'm obviously confining my comments to institutions of such a scope that there would be, for example, GUARDS. Banks and estates and such, not somebody's house in the suburbs.

[oDDity]

What's the difference between a mansion and a large house?

In the mansion there there is more and better loot, and more places to hide.

Its actually easier to steal from a large house.

OF course, I don't think anywhere in the past, other than maybe a castle, would have been guarded in the way a thief level is guarded, but again, in the game you are a human brain against those AI, which all 'think' and behave in exactly the same way.

[ZylonBane]

What's the difference between a mansion and a large house?

The difference is that people don't build FMs around large houses, because they're boring.