Life-Like AI vs Good AI

[Spirit]

Didn't we have this discussion about Monsters before? Maybe it was at func.

I think the "bad AI" in Quake is actually part of its interesting gameplay. Because you can learn patterns. Think of Super Mario with "good AI", I don't think it would be much fun. Quake is an arcade-type game, if you like it or not. The monsters might be boring (at least by now) but I think the right way for new monsters would be to think of creative new patterns, not random behaviour (or crosshair evasion like in Nehahra, god, what a bad decision).

[frag.machine]

I don't think the dumb monster AI was intentional. I can't conceive as a proposital decision a monster unable to follow a player from one room to another, or that ignores their comrades corpses while patrolling an area. Romero talked a lot about how the monsters in the original Quake concept would be fewer than in Doom, because they would be more challenging. There are reasons for this, and none was something like "hey, let's make all monsters dumb and predictable".

First, it was a case of balancing the scarce available CPU resources between monster AI and the render engine. Better AI requires things like A* pathfind or the stack-based target tracking we can see in the Frikbot - in other words, more memory and CPU cycles, when the target was a Pentium 100 with 8MB of RAM.

Second, the entire single player and coop aspects of the game were overlooked because Quake always was all about mutiplayer over TCP/IP.

And finally, let's not forget that Quake was a project developed under an internal crysis at id; people were really pissed off with Romero acting like a jerk and ignoring his duties in the project, and this spilled over the gameplay in many aspects.

In any case, the final result wasn't in any way what they intended to do.

[Spike]

Quake never used TCP/IP.
The actual networking supports UDP/IP, SPX/IPX, serial, serial-with-modem.

Quake was kinda rushed towards the end, yeah, the sort of time when things like AI gets polished and stuff. The AI is fairly simple, and just works as-is. Heck, monsters still try to attack you even during intermission!

The monsters are fun and interesting regardless of their AI level. Sure, its a weak point, but it doesn't stop it from being a fun arcade game, it merely breaks the immersion a little.
They all have different quirks, like grunts having a worse aim if you're moving, ogres with different weapons for different distances with grenades bouncing off walls behind you, fiends with their bouncy jumpyness of death, zombies that require you to reserve some rockets, flying things with slow projectiles that encourage you to strafe lots, shamblers and the shambler dance, the annoying vore missiles (grr), and, urm... well, knights, but enough said about those. Basically, Quake is a dancing game - think of the AI as the music, and the monster type as the tempo.
Artificial Stupidity can work just as well as Artificial Intelligence, for many things.

[frag.machine]

[mankrip]

Quake was supposed to be like Doom 3, only with flying dragons and Daikatana's "RPG elements".



I may or may not have been kidding in this post.

[frag.machine]

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