What Combat System Works Best in Isometric RPGs?

What Combat System Works Best in Isometric RPGs?

  • Real-Time with Pause

    Votes: 14 29.2%
  • Turn Based

    Votes: 32 66.7%
  • Real-Time

    Votes: 2 4.2%

  • Total voters
    48
  • Poll closed .
Those things probably did apply prior to 1998 when the Infinity Engine was being developed, but I highly doubt that a RTwP game being developed today or recently is being held back by CPU calculations regardless of what else is happening onscreen.

While I can't cite game-specific code and calculations, when I look at the statistics and math modeling I am doing now compared to what I thought was amazing (and was CPU-throttling) 15+ years ago ... it is incredible. Basically, the level of stuff I did then I can do with a click and it is instant ... the stuff that had to calculate overnight (or all weekend ... or continuously on a big Unix box under my desk) before, is now trivial.

So it is correct to think that simply removing barriers and expanding the scope of calculations, range of variables, number of terms and so on that were present in a 1998 IE game would be trivial now ... that is NOT how a new game would be approached.
 
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While I can't cite game-specific code and calculations, when I look at the statistics and math modeling I am doing now compared to what I thought was amazing (and was CPU-throttling) 15+ years ago … it is incredible. Basically, the level of stuff I did then I can do with a click and it is instant … the stuff that had to calculate overnight (or all weekend … or continuously on a big Unix box under my desk) before, is now trivial.

So it is correct to think that simply removing barriers and expanding the scope of calculations, range of variables, number of terms and so on that were present in a 1998 IE game would be trivial now … that is NOT how a new game would be approached.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but if you're trying to say that writing an efficient AI that's a challenge on a human-like level, given a complex system, is - in any way - trivial due to increased power - you're dead wrong.

But even back in BG days, the AI could seem like a challenge - but that's not literally AI (Artificial Intelligence). The "AI" wasn't the challenge at all, the challenge was about hitpoints, damage and RNG. Essentially, it was a bunch of scripts written for each NPC. They hand-made behavior for the "big fights" - which means they had certain NPCs cast certain spells - or at least categorized what kind of spells would be cast in a specific order.

Not unlike what they asked the players to do in Dragon Age.

But that's what I call trickery that won't be a challenge at all once the player has learned the scripts. An AI that's supposed to be a challenge will ADAPT to the human player, and it will not follow a list like that.

In BG, all you had to do was watch the enemy cast his spells, and you'd know EXACTLY what would happen upon a reload. That's what I meant by adapting to the rules.

People perceive some games as having a "challenging" AI because they're getting their asses kicked. But it's a matter of creating efficient scripts that take advantage of the rules in a "human-like" way but which can't adapt once the player learns what to do.

One of the most challenging "AIs" like this I've tried, personally, is StarCraft - where the entire game is designed around a very specific pattern of resource-gathering. There's this optimal amount of gatherers you have to build in a very specific order - and this is something that takes quite a while to learn as a player. Blizzard designed the game in this way, because they wanted it to be highly competitive - and they wanted players to learn these patterns to be efficient.

To me, that's super boring and predictable - and it's not a challenge as much as it's simply a long hard lesson.

So, you don't need much processing power for scripts or trickery.

You DO need a MASSIVE amount of processing power for a challenging AI that actually adapts, and which you can't defeat simply by learning patterns.

If we want a game to challenge us like that, in real-time, we're going to have to wait for years and years.

Very few games even have AIs that can adapt to anything at all. I do believe the Stardock games have something, but I think that's less about providing a challenge - and more about simulating human behavior in diplomacy and what not.

That's also the reason I admire Bethesda for TRYING to do something like this with Radiant AI. Of course, when you boil it down - it's likely still just a bunch of scripts - but they're sophisticated and they do enable the NPCs to, seemingly, have a life of their own which isn't entirely predictable.

The Gothic/Risen games, for instance, are mostly fully scripted. Great for immersion - but not very lifelike once you notice how predictable everything that happens is.
 
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but if you're trying to say that writing an efficient AI that's a challenge on a human-like level, given a complex system, is - in any way - trivial due to increased power - you're dead wrong.

What I was doing was actually agreeing with your core concepts from before - that while handling many of the issues Bioware and other developers would have faced in AI programming would be handled more easily now, it is not a static problem, because with more processing power we have reset expectations and tried to move more and more towards 'smart AI' rather than just scripted actions and have gotten to at least preset small-scale neural nets and decision trees … but that is far from a full scale AI.

What I was also saying was something that is pretty obvious - the problems we can tackle in real-time now have increased exponentially from 15+ years ago (not an opinion), so that the AI possibilities that we could have if someone was making a Infinity Engine style game now WOULD seem much more like 'lifelike AI' to someone from 1998 (subjective analysis).

The Gothic/Risen games, for instance, are mostly fully scripted. Great for immersion - but not very lifelike once you notice how predictable everything that happens is.

Very true - I remember the 2nd time having the urgent messenger gallop past me into town in Oblivion … I had to restart the game less than an hour in and was amazed at how 'same-ish' the so-called 'Radiant AI' was. I actually found the scripted stuff from Gothic 2 more enjoyable (though less technically advanced).

Which makes me think - is it better to give more 'organically evolving' behavior or stuff that makes the player feel immersed. They are not the same - think about walking around Times Square in NYC as a tourist, a resident, or a RPG super-hero :)
 
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What I was doing was actually agreeing with your core concepts from before - that while handling many of the issues Bioware and other developers would have faced in AI programming would be handled more easily now, it is not a static problem, because with more processing power we have reset expectations and tried to move more and more towards 'smart AI' rather than just scripted actions and have gotten to at least preset small-scale neural nets and decision trees … but that is far from a full scale AI.

Well, one would think so - but seeing as how we've seen almost no examples of "lifelike" AI - I don't think we've moved expectations much.

That said, I've noticed a lot of TB strategy game fans bitch about how they're always able to defeat the AI, as if they expect a different result.

That tells me that a lot of fans don't have a clue what it would take to write an AI that you couldn't defeat once you've learned the ropes of the game.

What I was also saying was something that is pretty obvious - the problems we can tackle in real-time now have increased exponentially from 15+ years ago (not an opinion), so that the AI possibilities that we could have if someone was making a Infinity Engine style game now WOULD seem much more like 'lifelike AI' to someone from 1998 (subjective analysis).

We can handle more scripts, sure, but it's not like the rest of the games have remained static. Stuff like realistic physics, advanced weather patterns, day/night cycles, and so on all take up significant processing power.

But we're not at a stage where we could have a "lifelike" AI in a game. Not even close.

When I say "lifelike" I'm talking about an AI that could adapt to more than a tiny handful of player actions.

Very true - I remember the 2nd time having the urgent messenger gallop past me into town in Oblivion … I had to restart the game less than an hour in and was amazed at how 'same-ish' the so-called 'Radiant AI' was. I actually found the scripted stuff from Gothic 2 more enjoyable (though less technically advanced).

I've been impressed by Radiant AI, but that's because I understand the limitations of the system. I know a lot of people heard about it and expected some kind of AI revolution - which is partly the fault of Bethesda marketing, I suppose.

That said, Gothic most definitely had some impressive scripting and wonderful NPC reactions and so on.

Which makes me think - is it better to give more 'organically evolving' behavior or stuff that makes the player feel immersed. They are not the same - think about walking around Times Square in NYC as a tourist, a resident, or a RPG super-hero :)

If we're going to have lifelike behavior at any point in time, someone will have to experiment and do something interesting with it.

I, for one, am willing to sacrifice some immersion for that kind of step forward. However, it must be tempered - and obviously it's not a good idea if your entire game falls apart due to stupid stuff.
 
Wait… so now we're talking about "lifelike AI"?

Funny how that evolved from just being able to calculate a lot of options on the fly.

But I'm sure that's what you were talking about the entire time, right? ;)
 
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Wait… so now we're talking about "lifelike AI"?

Funny how that evolved from just being able to calculate a lot of options on the fly.

But I'm sure that's what you were talking about the entire time, right? ;)

What happened to "let's just move on"?

Yes, I've been talking about challenging and human-like AI from the beginning and you would have known that if you paid a little attention:

It DOES take an extreme amount of calculations to develop an AI that can use a large arsenal of options available in a smart or challenging way. This gets clearer when you think about how long it took before we had a computer that could challenge a real Chess master. Chess has a relatively narrow amount of options compared to something like a sophisticated party-based tactical combat system.

For every ability you implement, it adds to the complexity of calculations by an order of magnitude. It's easy to trivialise the effort involved in making an AI even remotely "human-like" or efficient - but it's not a fair position.

I haven't been talking about scripts or non-AI trickery, which I believe I pointed out as the way developers give you the illusion of challenge.

I clarified this in my post about it, which you responded to. Maybe by repeating it, you might actually read what I'm saying?

Here:

All developers can do is to use tricks to try and make an AI appear efficient - and to take advantage of the fact that human players need to adapt to the rules first. But once a player has mastered a complex combat system, the AI doesn't stand the slightest chance - given similar power levels. The only thing that makes combat remotely interesting in that case, is through use of random number generation. That makes it slightly less predictable.

So, again, yes - to challenge a human being beyond the challenge of adapting to the rules of any given system, you need a massive amount of CPU calculations - and even if we dedicated everything to AI alone, we wouldn't be able to do that in a complex system with fair rules for both human and computer.

It doesn't matter that CPUs are much more powerful today, as it's still far below what we'd need. Even if we had the power, it would be a monumental task to develop a creative AI capable of adapting to human interactions.
 
Good question since txa1265 was replying to me. :)

And yes, I was paying attention. Enough to see what you did there.

Sure thing, JDR ;)

But I'm sure that's what you were talking about the entire time, right?

When I say move on, I'm talking about you and I - not everyone else who're actually interested in debating something and maybe even pay attention.

You're so full of shit when you can't accept your own ignorance ;)

No biggie, though.
 
Poor DArt. Always falling back to insults when exposed.

Go ahead and get that last word now. I'm actually feeling a little embarrassed for you right now.
 
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Let's just move on and see if you can actually leave it alone this time. I seem to remember you bitching about how "some people" can't leave threads alone with this kind of thing ;)
 
Very true - I remember the 2nd time having the urgent messenger gallop past me into town in Oblivion … I had to restart the game less than an hour in and was amazed at how 'same-ish' the so-called 'Radiant AI' was. I actually found the scripted stuff from Gothic 2 more enjoyable (though less technically advanced).

Which makes me think - is it better to give more 'organically evolving' behavior or stuff that makes the player feel immersed. They are not the same - think about walking around Times Square in NYC as a tourist, a resident, or a RPG super-hero :)

I agree. I expected a great deal more from Oblivion's A.I and found the end result quite underwhelming compared to lifelike gameworld I had experienced in g1 and g2.

But to Benthesa's defence I think their orginal concept was a lot more ambitious, they just failed to optimize it properly which forced them scale back a.i behaviour a lot. As the writer in this article aptly states: "After reading of these past incarnations of RAI, it feels like the NPCs in the release build of Oblivion have been lobotomized."

http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/17/dimming-the-radiant-ai-in-oblivion/
in some cases, we the developers have had to consciously tone down the types of behavior they carry out. Again, why? Because sometimes, the AI is so goddamned smart and determined it screws up our quests! Seriously, sometimes it's gotten so weird it's like dealing with a holodeck that's gone sentient. Imagine playing The Sims, and your Sims have a penchant for murder and theft. So a lot of the time this stuff is funny, and amazing, and emergent, and it's awesome when it happens. Other times, it's so unexpected, it breaks stuff. Designers need a certain amount of control over the scenarios they create, and things can go haywire when NPCs have a mind of their own.

Funny example: In one Dark Brotherhood quest, you can meet up with this shady merchant who sells skooma. During testing, the NPC would be dead when the player got to him. Why? NPCs from the local skooma den were trying to get their fix, didn't have any skooma, and were killing the merchant to get it!
 
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Yup, I remember reading about that back around release. I really hope they've focused on this aspect for the next TES game. It's one of the most interesting parts of their world simulation - and they have every opportunity to push the emergent factor forward. Especially now that the new consoles have had so much memory added. They have the capacity to keep a lot of crap running in memory for the NPC scripts.
 
Turns in Baldur's gate share the name with turns in turn based and that's about as far as it go. It's a cadence and it makes sense that things follow a cadence.
BG is turn based. The unit of resolution is a turn. The confusion comes from people reducing turn based to the sequence "ugoigo"
BG is a turn based game that do not go by the sequence (or cadence) "ugoigo"
Real Time (with or without pause) will always be more appropriate where tactical combat clearly isn't a focus or even present at all.
That sentence should read:
Real Time (with or without pause) will always be more appropriate where tactical combat clearly is a focus or even present at all.

As evidenced by:


Hit and run works better in real time. True mostly because in Turn based you are either :
-Stuck in a small combat mode arena. Not all TB games are like that.
-Firing with the Bow takes so much action points you cant run away.
This can also happen in real time games where firing with the bow takes time.

Hit and run is tactics called for certain strategical demands.

Real time games support the use of tactics (as reported in the quotation) while games with the "ugoigo" sequence do not.

As a consequence, real time games are the tactical games.

The "ugoIgo" sequence does not support the use of tactics as you can not use basic tactics hit and run etc

When people want games that focus on tactics, they should go toward games that support the use of tactics. As shown here, real time games are better at this as "ugoigo" does not support basic tactics like hit and run.
 
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