The game in the preceding screenshot implemented visual and audio awareness for the enemy AI, a feature that later on we'll explore in detail in this book. This feature established the genre that we know today as a stealth game. So, the game uses Path Finding and a FSM, features that were already known from the beginning of the video game industry; But, in order to create something new, they also created new features, such as interaction with the environment, navigation behavior, visual/audio awareness, and AI interaction; a lot of things that didn't existed at the time but that are widely used today in different game genres, such as sports, racing, fighting, or FPS games, were also introduced:
After that huge step for game design, developers still faced other problems, or should I say, these new possibilities brought even more problems, because they were not perfect. The AI still didn't react as a real person, and many other elements was necessary to be implemented, not only in stealth games, but in all other genres, and one in particular-needed to improve their AI to make the game feel realistic.
We are talking about sports games, especially those that tried to simulate real-world team behaviors, such as basketball or football. interaction with the player is not the only thing that we need to care about; we left chess long time ago, where it was 1 versus 1. Now, we want more, and watching other games get realistic AI behaviors, sport fanatics started to ask for the same features in their
favorite games; after all, those games was based on real-world events, and for that reason, the AI should react as realistically as possible.
At this point, developers and game designers started to take into consideration AI interaction with itself, and that just like the enemies from PAC-MAN, the player should get the impression that each character in the game thinks for itself and reacts differently to the others. If we analyze it closely, the AI that is present in a sports game is structured like an FPS or RTS game, using different animation states, general movements, interactions, individual decisions, and finally tactics and collective decisions. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that sports games could reach the same level of realism as the other genres that had already greatly evolved in terms of AI development. However, there are few problems that only sports games had at the time: how to make so many characters on the same screen react differently but at the same time work together to achieve the same objective. With this problem in mind, developers started to improve the individual behaviors of each character, not only for the AI that was playing against the player but also for the AI that was playing alongside the player. Once again, Finite State Machines made up a crucial part of Artificial Intelligence, but the special touch that helped to create a realistic approach in the sports genre was the anticipation and awareness used in stealth games. The computer needed to calculate what the player was doing, where the ball was going, and coordinate all of that, as well as give a false impression of a team mindset toward the same plan. Combining the new features used in the new genre of stealth games with a vast number of characters on the same screen, it was possible to innovate the sports genre by creating a sports simulation type of game, which has gained so much popularity over the years. This helps us to understand that we can use almost the same methods for any type of game, even if it looks completely different; the core principles that we saw in the computer that played chess is still valuable to the sports game released 30 years later.
Let's move on to our last example, which also has great value in terms of how an AI character should behave to make it more realistic: the game is F.E.A.R., developed by Monolith Productions. What made this game so special in terms of Artificial Intelligence was the dialog between the enemy characters. While it wasn't an improvement from a technical point of view, it was definitely something that helped to showcase all of the development work that was put into the characters' AI, and this is so crucial because if the AI doesn't say it, it didn't happen. This is an important factor to take into consideration while creating a realistic AI character, giving the illusion that it's real; that means the false impression that the computer reacts like humans, and humans interact, so the AI should do the same. Not only did the dialog help to create a human-like atmosphere, it also helped to exhale all of the development put on the character that otherwise the player wouldn't notice was there. When the AI detects the player for the first time, it shouts that it found the player; when the AI loses sight of the player, it expresses that. When the squad of AI's are trying to find the player or ambush him, they speak about that, leaving the player imagining that the enemy is really capable of thinking and planning against him. Why is this so important? Because if we only had numbers and mathematical equations for the characters, they will react that way, without any human features, just math, and to make it look more human, it's necessary to input mistakes, errors, and dialog into the character AI, just to distract the player from the fact that he's playing against a machine.
The history of video game artificial intelligence is still far from perfect, and it's possible that it will take us decades to improve just a little bit more from what we achieved between the early 1950s and this present day, so don't be afraid of exploring what you are about to learn, combine, change, or delete some of the things to find different results, because great games did it in the past and they had a lot of success with it.
