Thanks for checking out not only my 75th episode of AI and Games, but the one dedicated to our 10-year anniversary. I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you all for your continued support of AI and Games! As mentioned in the video, this episode has been on the backlog for a *very* long time. In fact, long-time viewers may recall from the pinned comment on episode #50 that I had a different idea for celebrating our 50th episode. I recall looking my research notes at the time, but it wasn't far enough along for me to put it together. Let me stress I've not been working on this episode every day since 2018. It's been a little hobby of mine, as I sit and read the odd Lua script, or dig deep into a Reddit thread, trying to piece everything together gradually. And so when it came to celebrating 10 years of the channel, this was the topic that I just *had* to cover. As mentioned, my Design Dive on Bloodborne will be released in the coming months. Plus there is a lot of work happening in decompiling Elden Ring nowadays, and I feel compelled to add it to the backlog for a future episode. Oh and one last thing. Dark Souls isn't the only episode I've been working away on for years at a time. I hope to come back with another long overdue deep dive later this year.
You say in the first five minutes you did it the hard way and although not what you were talking about seeing that you were fat rolling I agree that you did it the hard way lol medium roll would of helped you alot more mate. 🙂👍
Thank you for doing this research! I am just getting into game AI programming, and your channel is a godsend, but more than that the Soulsborne games are the reason I even am trying to get into the field, and I never knew there was such a project to decompile the scripts let alone research the design patterns in them! I can't thank you enough, and hearing you plan on doing deeper dives into the FromSoft catalogue I honestly wish I could help contribute. I plan on spending many long nights looking through these decompilation works, and this video will be my own guidance as I moonlight as a AI designer. Cheers!!!
From lore videos with Vatti to obscure details with illusionary wall, and now a deep dive into the code that makes this game so unique with your video. Thank you for time and effort you poured into this video, it really shows. It seems like no matter how much I learn about this game over the years, it just keeps getting better and even more impressive.
This couldn't have been posted at a better time. I am the lead designer of a game studio and we've been working on a game similar to dark souls for a couple of years now. We recently decided on reworking some aspects regarding NPC AI and this has been very helpful as we always considered the AI in the Dark Souls franchise to be the finish line. Thanks for your work!
Oh lords I think I just got why sometimes the Godskin Noble in Elden Ring will immediately jump into the rolling animation even if you interrupt it or the start up animation. Usually, getting interrupted must trigger the "perform rolling attack goal failure", forcing the Noble to go back and start a new set of goals. This is how most enemies in general work. An enemy may then try to use the same attack it got interrupted preforming, but it'll start the attack pattern from the beginning. In the case of the Noble, playing the wind-up animation again. But for whatever reason, every so often, the goal will not fail when interrupted (like with a stance break), and Noble will immediately go into the rolling attack animation almost like a jump-scare, since it doesn't replay the wind up.
Not that it took a lot of time but it was pretty wild to hear someone introduce *dark souls*, as if it wasn't already a matter of course, I kind of appreciate that.
six years in the making? This deserves more recognition than it has gotten, especially for covering one of the most influential and groundbreaking games of all time
What a wonderful breakdown. The combination of research, clarity and obvious love for the source material makes this a compelling and educational watch. Thank you for your hard work.
21:07 I play Sekiro every day and this happen to me when I fight Owl Father Hirata. At some point of fight, we walk around ourselves looking into each other's eyes, and I know that if I I remain in that situation at a certain distance, for sure he will activate the fire owl attack and I will give him a nice mikiri. Its so tasty....
I recently wrote a paper for uni about AI in video games, it was for the Philosophy of AI and mostly geared towards phenomenology (Enactivism & the Intentional Arc) though I cited your video and info graph in 'How AI is actually used in video games'. Thanks for making such great stuff!
I remember my first time playing Dark Souls. I was intimidated by the game's reputation for being difficult, but I decided to give it a chance and I'm glad that I did. In the video you mention Sif is your favorite boss in the game, my favorite boss would be Gwyn. Most people would say Ornstein and Smough, but I wanted to be more original with my answer. Obviously he can be beaten easily by parrying, but Gwyn is more aggressive than anything you've faced before plus the story is building up to your final battle with him and showed where From Software was going with the bosses in their later games.
I used the greatshield of Artorius for my 1st playthrough and it was OP with how much it could block with it's 88 stability. Not once did I get guard broken after using that, not even against bosses.
I'm amazed to hear you've been doing this for 10 years! This is the first I've seen of you, and I feel that detailed-yet-digestible game AI analysis is certainly a hole in the game dev TH-cam space. I hope some serious growth is on the way, and I have some binging to do!
My favorite boss will always be Manus, such a sick design and a really difficult fight, yet totally fair once you figure out how it works. Fromsoft dlcs never disappoint
I wanna see AI in games on RE5 Sheva A lot of people give her AI shit, but whenever I pay attention to her AI compared to the AI of many other AAA titles I swear she is a lot more advanced than she is given credit for
this was amazing. near the end, you mention a deep dive of a specific boss AI would be out of scope for the video. at some point, i would love to see a deep dive on a boss. thank you for the video !
Thank you, now I know how to beat these games, Lag the Wheel, summon someone with high ping so you can easily lag the wheel, and add a bit of hesitation to the boss. jokes aside, that was a very informative video, keep up the good work.
Great video and nice work! I'd be interested to see how this varies with Sekiro and Elden Ring. Looking forward to Bloodborne for sure! My favourite From game.
Great vid, and once again congrats on the 10 years! Completely unrelated side note: not that its a game this channel woild neccess8cover, but the new Chinese Room ge appears to have an entirely scottish cast of characters and I feel like they really dropped the ball not hiring you on to voice😂
An interesting side effect of characters being more likely to block in Sekiro is that leashing them feels rather different. The miniboss who whistles wolves into the fight is a good example. He infuriated me a couple times, but pulling him away to the edge of his 'zone of interest' means he will just mostly get stuck blocking your attacks. I think O'Rin does similar...
@@Ghorda9 yeah, and I've managed that way too but not on my first playthrough. He is a great test on sustaining pressure cause once you let him summon things get tough. First time I found him frustrating and cheesed him!
I don't quite understand... The combat wheel, sure, that's a utility reasoner. Decomposing a goal into subgoals, I'd like a concrete example here; A top goal like "Kill player" would probably decompose to "Keep appropriate distance", "Keep up sufficient health", "Turn the player's health to 0", etc., but when a set of goals is established, how is that translated into actions? Is there some deconfliction between goals?
For someone having done a lot of combat AI this is very interesting thank you so much for this video! After regarding the video, there is common issue of Combat AI that I wonder how Dark Soul is handling: 1- Combat Positioning & Pacing: In a lot of games AI aren't allowed to attack at the same time. That often leads to weird situation were only one AI can attack at the same time and can feel very scripted to the player. Do you know how Dark Soul is tackling that issue? Is that a ticket system? I already tried to records video on few Souls games, on noticed that they allow several AI to attack the player at the same time, but it still feel limited to 3/4 AI at max? Also, I noticed that after attacks AI seems to have cooldown on its attack behavior as it will try to reposition sometimes after attacking while sometimes it will attack directly. I noticed that based on my behavior as a player, they would go more into reposition if I don't attack while if I attack or heal myself they start to become aggressive. Do they have a sort of aggressivity system, or is it just part of the "combat wheel" you mention, with the recent player input being taking into account to select the next behavior? 2- Behavior Hysteresis: I wonder if there is any mechanics for the AI to keep its current behavior and not always switching to other behaviors? You mentionned with the combat wheel that the probability for specific behavior are constantly being updated. By if that's the case, what prevent the AI for not always switching between a lot of different behaviors? Is the AI locked into a single behavior until the behavior is considered completed? To give an example, if the AI is told: "When at more than 50 meters, you should go to the player position and do an Attack X", one common issue is that: If you allow the AI to change its behavior while doing the "Go To" action, while the AI is getting closer, you end up with a probability wheel that is going to change completely, meaning that the AI is likely to select something else while as a designer you would have want to keep that behavior for some time. And on the opposite side, if you never allow the behavior to change until completion, you risk the issue that due to some fact, the behavior took time to perform (for example the "Go To" didn't go as expected like the player as moved away) and its not relevant at all anymore and the AI should be switching to something else. Do you know if there is trick that Dark Soul AI is doing to tackle this issue? :) Again thanks a lot for the video, it is very good material!
Enemies "respawning" dead and re-ragdolling feels thematically very appropriate for Dark Souls. Does Solaire (I think he'd be the only one) use one of the two combat scripts (overworld vs. summoned) when he's encountered as an enemy in between the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, or is there a different AI configuration for that encounter?
He does have at least two scripts (overworld and summoned) but I need to double check my notes as I wouldn't be surprised if he has a third combat script for when he's a red phantom.
just found this and hope to see more since i subbed, great video and cannot wait for bloodbornes vid, a game where i still need to beat the orphan and have yet to do so XD
Ah, 2019 was when I first played ds1, and to this day I've since played through the game numerous times on both pc and on my switch, hell, I had half a mind to get the ptde edition on ps3 just because.
funny that 2 uses a different engine, because it feels entirely soulsborne to me. its actually my favorite from game! i didnt know the engine was a different one.
While it's a separate engine, it started as a branch of their existing Souls engine. So it's not surprising it still 'feels' like Dark Souls over though it went a different direction. Sort of like how Call of Duty for many years was built with different versions of their engine that started as branches from Call of Duty 4. They're all Call of Duty but you can easily tell which games were Infinity Ward versus Treyarch given how they feel.
Very interesting video! This sounds much like how a combination of a behavior tree (allowing for hierarchical tasks) and a utility system (for randomness) would work. Is this different from that combination in some way?
I think yes, you could do it like that. I think the one benefit of this approach, is how data driven it is. Behaviours can be added or removed very easily in the Lua script, which might be a little more laborious with Behaviour Trees given you might need to go in and edit them all manually. But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how a lot of Soulslikes (notably things like Lords of the Fallen) have done it over the years.
almost sure that it is the bosses in the megaman zero games, which arent FGs, but was made by none other than capcom, work in a rather similar fashion, if not almost the same but adapted for the good ol' GBA hardware and the fact that the boss design phylosophy is different (MMZ relies quite a bit more in randomness and true set patterns. Not to mention things having to lighter and simpler due to the hardware at hand)
I love Dark Spuls, and it sure changed a lot for the industry and it’s no secret that tons of games have taken inspiration from it… But, that being said… saying it’s one of the best games of all time is a little bit of a stretch. I think a majority of FROM players will rank it under Elden Ring, Bloodborne, DS3, and Sekiro. Not only that, the last 1/2 or 1/3 of the game is objectively much worse and even felt to be unfinished when compared to the beginning half. DS1 is revolutionary for the genre and gaming in general, but unfortunately it falls short when compared to pretty much every other game FROM went on to make (and many of the games inspired by it such as Stellar Blade, Lies of P, Star Wars, etc).
Hi, Please forgive what will likely be a longer comment than most. With subtlety & nuance being in rare supply online, I try to be as clear as possible. But my blunt nature is often mistaken for arrogance or condescension. Which is never my intention. As that's pointless when trying to communicate with anyone. I am but a scrubby indie dev. Who's chosen to focus on systems design. I've been learning UE for 5 years this November. I'm also legally blind (albinism = 20/200 vision). In 2020 I strained my eyes to a point of functional blindness. I could still see. However keeping my eyes open for any length of time caused me physical pain. So from June 2020 to June 2021 I was basically blind. All I could do was listen to Caverns & Creature audiobooks & the UE tutorials on loop. Which also gave me a lot of time to think. The technicalities, limitations & realties of game development are wildly misunderstood online. Often leading to name brand gamers innocently spreading misleading information. I thought it was an issue of language. As in game development using common phrases. But "Optimization" means something different in game development. In comparison to the way "Optimization" is used in gaming discourse. Online the term is often reduced to "X game is poorly optimized because it can't hit 60 fps." So when my vision finally recovered. I set out to listen to gamers and take notes. What do gamers want? What type of systems do they dislike? Things like that. It didn't take long to realize how misunderstood making games is. Or that well meaning TH-camrs are often the source of rumors like "60 fps is standard." For the record. Yes, 60 fps is great. But out of the 1300+ 9th gen games 39% run at 60. If 60 was indeed a standard, we should see something like 45-51% of games running 60. I've talked to 12 AAA devs on the matter. Every last one agrees 60 is better. Every last one also acknowledged the technicities, limitations & realities that can make it impossible for every game to hit a solid 60. My point... I absolutely love your channel. There are plenty of people analyzing games. But your combination of in depth break downs. And practical experience is well priceless. Because if gaming discourse is every to improve. We need more than the often surface level information being presented as facts. I've found Ai and Games, No Clip & Game From Scratch to be the best sources for solid information on TH-cam. And just wanted to take a moment to thank you for this video. As well as the rest of your body of work. Take care and have a good one
Mhm you don't put much stake in Digital Foundry? Sometimes interesting material. Yes 30 is standard on console for the time being but something vaguely close to 60 for the same games is a common expectation on PC, with esports being expected to hit at least 90. Of course "what PC" and "what settings" is the question and that's a moving target, obviously, and yes quite a few people have sort of excessive expectations, like if already Medium-High settings are console-equivalent and fully preserve artistic vision, there's absolutely no point demanding good performance on Ultra settings on midrange hardware, it sort of makes sense for PC ports to offer settings that only start making sense on future hardware. Sometimes compromises and exceptions are OK, but it has to make a lower framerate worth your while somehow, and games that underperform are definitely a thing. It's particularly painful when you have this game, Dark Souls, it came out on PS3 and Xbox360 targeting 30 (with a hit or miss success), which is fine, understandable, difficult to expect more; but then coming to PC they haven't taken out the 30fps limit, and it was painful, given even a 2007 PC with a Core2Quad CPU and a Geforce 8800 variant will run circles around those consoles and should be able to hit 60 at around 900p resolutions or higher running the same workload, and people were used to just about all games ported from these systems to be able to run unlocked framerate or at least limited to 60 on PC instead of 30, and a PC of that era was usually good for that as well. Yes it's a significant amount of work to adjust a 33ms fixed timestep engine, but when paying full retail price for a port that comes a year late, it's an effort that one would expect. The GPU performance was also a little lower than one may expect given again the Xbox360 origin of the game. And a fair expectation is also when a PS3 or Xbox360 game gets ported to newer much more powerful consoles, that it should target 60fps as well, since it's developed against older less heavyweight rendering and simulation techniques and doesn't have to compete head on with the newest games.
A stable framerate is generally more important than hitting 60. Well assuming you can get above like 25, 60fps is just the best standard monitors will do and a benchmark for something running extra good. Although it depends on the hardware whether running sub 60 un-capped is an issue, if I (or a reviewer) has a high end pc and the game runs at like 40 fps its not a good sign or if your game is very simple and it runs at like 30 (uncapped) on midrange set up. Its not necessarily the end of the world but it doesn't make you look great as a dev and depending who the dev is people may expect better. Having said all that, gamers can be big babies about it and if you want to cap your game at 30 then it won't be noticed by most, nor do small time devs catch as much flak for poor optimisation assuming its playable.
@SianaGearz darksouls has to be capped, fps is tied to game speed, and if you run it faster than intended things get weird. I don't think they considered a pc release when they made it
@@CAMSLAYER13 There are two ways to handle this type of conversion. One is to decouple the presentation from simulation, and introduce a non-invasive presentation interpolation system. This can be done by a 3-4 person expert team in a handful months on a fixed-framerate engine. People like nixxes and bluepoint are quite versed in this. The other is to introduce the new fixed framerate of 60. It does require a substantial fine tuning of physics and scripting to make sure it's working as intended, plus QA overhead. They have after all done this for the Remaster. It's actually a common strategy for console games which aren't too complex to run simulation at 60 and presentation at 30 (fixed frameskip), so they can get 60 in future releases without much effort. Specific scripts and subsystems can have fractional invocation rates such as 30, 20, or much less to make it fit within original CPU budget. As i said, year late and full price, you do hope for more than the bare minimum effort. It's not an absolute killer criterium but to me and many others it does make a difference between paying full price right ahead and waiting till it's deeply discounted.
I'm wondering if Thousand Land might be where fromsoft started doing this type of AI. It centers around AI driven units that carry out tasks th-cam.com/video/CRi7TBELlAg/w-d-xo.html Another possibility is that they weren't satisfied with the AI of early armored core games, where enemy cores could have some huge number of configurations and having to manually make finite state machines for all of them.
I always imagined Dark Souls AI boiled down to "walk to the player and play random relevant attack animation depending on range and/or specific animation states the player is in", because that's roughly how it seems to work in the actual game. I wonder if it was something they already had in the engine for previous games or maybe they wanted to build some system a la Radiant for NPCs, because it sounds like a huge overkill for monsters.
Games are usually more intricate than ppl think. Even with loads of abstraction in higher level programming languages, there is generally a lot of trial/error involved.
@@Retrofire-47 I mean, I am a game developer and I know that games are even more of a mess than normal software. What I'm saying is, it's very unlikely they designed their AI system from the ground up to achieve, well, what the Souls actually achieve because it's a huge overkill. So there must be some other reason for such complexity.
Agreed. If this is the system they came up with, it's WAY over-engineered for the actual end result. It's significantly easier to read, even the modern Souls games, than what this system seems designed to do. And largely these mechanics could've been designed using far simpler solutions that would've undoubtedly been far more performant.
@@desmondbrown5508 Could you elaborate, please? this video inspired me to learn game AI. i'm currently learning it DIY using applied OOP. right now it seems really basic, but all i have is a method which operates upon an 'Alien' class to alter its internal state property, based upon certain game conditions. So my current experiment is to change the state to "pursue" if the player is within a certain proximity, then use a vector to navigate towards them.
Yes! One of the conditions that can activate an attack goal is when the target has starting healing. I was beyond angry, but also relieved, to discover this was the case.
Agreed, but also, most boss fights are fought the same way (or VERY similarly) each time. If the concept of 'no two fights are the same' is that they literally didn't use the exact same pattern of attacks from one fight to the next that's a very very low bar to pass that almost every video game in existence (even Hollow Knight, which wasn't even made by technical programmers at all) hits.
Would you say this video is a good place to begin understanding AI in game design? i rather enjoyed it. I'm wondering if there is another video you've released which is more generalized
Thanks for watching. I'd recommend checking out my AI 101 playlist. I tend to deal with high-level descriptions of methodologies in that series, and then point to specific episodes I've made which go into more detail.
I know it has helped people in the past. If you're looking at specific game design ideas, then watching episodes focussed on games similar to your interests will also be useful..
Kind of amazing that fallen order looks to dark souls for its combat, has several years of better tech and a whole series of games to base it on, yet still made probably the worst combat in a game I've seen in years.
3:20 I dont think Sekiro fits into this, it has nothing to do with "soulslikes" its more a straightforward action game. A different thing like armored core not part of this.
I'd argue it's the opposite. The goal planner is very much top down, but the behaviour definitions and their probability distributions make it *feel* bottom-up in practice.
The one exception is dark souls 2, of course it fuckin is. It was a weird time ok, we try and forget about it. Its best if people just don't mention it.
There is no AI in Souls. The enemy chooses an uninterruptible attack move which you need to dodge or get fked and then it is vulnerable as a static dummy for a few seconds where you can attack. Rinse and repeat.
Lot of talking a coping to dance around how the ai is just really stupid and just throwing random bs to confuse stupid people. It a well know concept that the human brain dose not process random very well and like bad gamblers gamers prefer to throw them selves at a problem Arlen brute force it. Stupid ai for stupid players.
That's what the "wheel" visual is all about. Bad players will treat every action as opaquely random, and wait until the boss swings to begin their reaction. Good players will corral the boss into more predictable paths by standing at a certain distance, angle, etc. so they (mostly) know what the boss is gonna do before he does it.
@@jamesarthurkimbell "enemy will execute a close range attack if you are in close range and a mid range attack if you are in mid range with some attacks being rare and some common" isn't a particularly hard concept to grasp and isn't unique to Souls games, though?
@@AliceLoverdrive I agree, it's not unique, and it shouldn't be surprising. But in practice, that's what happens. People ask "how do you dodge X attack?" or they complain "Y attack is unreactable!" without stepping back to address how we get there.
I think there's a misuse of the point you made. It's not that the brain doesn't process random well that causes problem here. It's that the brain will consider something as random if it fails to understand the patterns involved. So even though the patterns are rarely random, it will feel random to those that don't get it.
Thanks for checking out not only my 75th episode of AI and Games, but the one dedicated to our 10-year anniversary. I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you all for your continued support of AI and Games!
As mentioned in the video, this episode has been on the backlog for a *very* long time. In fact, long-time viewers may recall from the pinned comment on episode #50 that I had a different idea for celebrating our 50th episode. I recall looking my research notes at the time, but it wasn't far enough along for me to put it together. Let me stress I've not been working on this episode every day since 2018. It's been a little hobby of mine, as I sit and read the odd Lua script, or dig deep into a Reddit thread, trying to piece everything together gradually. And so when it came to celebrating 10 years of the channel, this was the topic that I just *had* to cover.
As mentioned, my Design Dive on Bloodborne will be released in the coming months. Plus there is a lot of work happening in decompiling Elden Ring nowadays, and I feel compelled to add it to the backlog for a future episode. Oh and one last thing. Dark Souls isn't the only episode I've been working away on for years at a time. I hope to come back with another long overdue deep dive later this year.
You say in the first five minutes you did it the hard way and although not what you were talking about seeing that you were fat rolling I agree that you did it the hard way lol medium roll would of helped you alot more mate. 🙂👍
Thank you for doing this research! I am just getting into game AI programming, and your channel is a godsend, but more than that the Soulsborne games are the reason I even am trying to get into the field, and I never knew there was such a project to decompile the scripts let alone research the design patterns in them! I can't thank you enough, and hearing you plan on doing deeper dives into the FromSoft catalogue I honestly wish I could help contribute. I plan on spending many long nights looking through these decompilation works, and this video will be my own guidance as I moonlight as a AI designer. Cheers!!!
96
From lore videos with Vatti to obscure details with illusionary wall, and now a deep dive into the code that makes this game so unique with your video.
Thank you for time and effort you poured into this video, it really shows.
It seems like no matter how much I learn about this game over the years, it just keeps getting better and even more impressive.
Now who's covering the philosophical implications?
@Jurglenuts philosophical and symbolic... Ratatoskr has some videos on the various themes
This couldn't have been posted at a better time. I am the lead designer of a game studio and we've been working on a game similar to dark souls for a couple of years now. We recently decided on reworking some aspects regarding NPC AI and this has been very helpful as we always considered the AI in the Dark Souls franchise to be the finish line. Thanks for your work!
That's awesome, best of luck if you rework it and with the rest of the game!!
sounds awesome! keep up the good work 😃
Oh lords I think I just got why sometimes the Godskin Noble in Elden Ring will immediately jump into the rolling animation even if you interrupt it or the start up animation. Usually, getting interrupted must trigger the "perform rolling attack goal failure", forcing the Noble to go back and start a new set of goals. This is how most enemies in general work. An enemy may then try to use the same attack it got interrupted preforming, but it'll start the attack pattern from the beginning. In the case of the Noble, playing the wind-up animation again.
But for whatever reason, every so often, the goal will not fail when interrupted (like with a stance break), and Noble will immediately go into the rolling attack animation almost like a jump-scare, since it doesn't replay the wind up.
Not that it took a lot of time but it was pretty wild to hear someone introduce *dark souls*, as if it wasn't already a matter of course, I kind of appreciate that.
Indeed 🤔
six years in the making? This deserves more recognition than it has gotten, especially for covering one of the most influential and groundbreaking games of all time
What a wonderful breakdown. The combination of research, clarity and obvious love for the source material makes this a compelling and educational watch.
Thank you for your hard work.
21:07 I play Sekiro every day and this happen to me when I fight Owl Father Hirata.
At some point of fight, we walk around ourselves looking into each other's eyes, and I know that if I I remain in that situation at a certain distance, for sure he will activate the fire owl attack and I will give him a nice mikiri.
Its so tasty....
I recently wrote a paper for uni about AI in video games, it was for the Philosophy of AI and mostly geared towards phenomenology (Enactivism & the Intentional Arc) though I cited your video and info graph in 'How AI is actually used in video games'. Thanks for making such great stuff!
I remember my first time playing Dark Souls. I was intimidated by the game's reputation for being difficult, but I decided to give it a chance and I'm glad that I did. In the video you mention Sif is your favorite boss in the game, my favorite boss would be Gwyn. Most people would say Ornstein and Smough, but I wanted to be more original with my answer. Obviously he can be beaten easily by parrying, but Gwyn is more aggressive than anything you've faced before plus the story is building up to your final battle with him and showed where From Software was going with the bosses in their later games.
I used the greatshield of Artorius for my 1st playthrough and it was OP with how much it could block with it's 88 stability. Not once did I get guard broken after using that, not even against bosses.
I'm amazed to hear you've been doing this for 10 years! This is the first I've seen of you, and I feel that detailed-yet-digestible game AI analysis is certainly a hole in the game dev TH-cam space. I hope some serious growth is on the way, and I have some binging to do!
My favorite boss will always be Manus, such a sick design and a really difficult fight, yet totally fair once you figure out how it works. Fromsoft dlcs never disappoint
I wanna see AI in games on RE5 Sheva
A lot of people give her AI shit, but whenever I pay attention to her AI compared to the AI of many other AAA titles I swear she is a lot more advanced than she is given credit for
Put a sniper on her inventory, she doesn't miss!
Great video, would love to see you digging up the boss AI
Love this game and love this channel, so great to see them collide!
I love these videos, and Dark Souls is one of my favorite games of all time! Super excited to watch. Thanks for all the great content you put out!
This was AWESOME!
Thank you.
this was amazing. near the end, you mention a deep dive of a specific boss AI would be out of scope for the video. at some point, i would love to see a deep dive on a boss. thank you for the video !
32:20 "At least on the normal difficulty".
Sorry, what do you mean by that?:)
Superb video and content as always!
This was an absolute pleasure to watch, thank you.
Loved this video, great to see so many Scots (yourself, Writing On Games, Smoughtown) enthusiastically covering FromSoftware stuff.
Great video, I've been working on making the AI in my game more reactive to player activity and this video has been a great resource for that.
God I won’t ever get how like, the game we play can just be read by lines of code. Straight up magic. But fascinating to see behind the curtain
Its magic till you work in the industry. But yeah call it ai is more of a misnomer a lot of stuff can be pedicted including random numbers
Great job my dude. Incredible in depth work.
Huh…Ceaseless Discharge has attacks. Who knew?
Great video! I really enjoyed this deep dive into the AI.
This is a phenomenal breakdown. Thank you for doing the research to get here!
Thank you, now I know how to beat these games, Lag the Wheel, summon someone with high ping so you can easily lag the wheel, and add a bit of hesitation to the boss. jokes aside, that was a very informative video, keep up the good work.
Congrats on 10 whole years, friend.
Here's to much more success.
Please do a video on Elden Ring AI, just to confirm or deny heavy input reading.
Awesome Vid!
Thank You very much for Your Work! Greetings from Germany
Awesome! Came here by way of Cakez video.
Great video. I imagine finding the correct weightings for the behaviours must have taken a lot of play testing!
What mod did you use for the picture quality? Your game looks amazing! So much detail in the picture. Thanks!
Wow! What an amazing video!
Excellent news for me, there's 74 more!!!
Great video and nice work! I'd be interested to see how this varies with Sekiro and Elden Ring. Looking forward to Bloodborne for sure! My favourite From game.
amazing analysis for an amazing game.
Great vid, and once again congrats on the 10 years!
Completely unrelated side note: not that its a game this channel woild neccess8cover, but the new Chinese Room ge appears to have an entirely scottish cast of characters and I feel like they really dropped the ball not hiring you on to voice😂
My career as a voice actor remains a fantasy at this point!
An interesting side effect of characters being more likely to block in Sekiro is that leashing them feels rather different. The miniboss who whistles wolves into the fight is a good example. He infuriated me a couple times, but pulling him away to the edge of his 'zone of interest' means he will just mostly get stuck blocking your attacks. I think O'Rin does similar...
you can stop him from summoning the dogs if you just keep up the pressure and don't let him breath
@@Ghorda9 yeah, and I've managed that way too but not on my first playthrough. He is a great test on sustaining pressure cause once you let him summon things get tough. First time I found him frustrating and cheesed him!
never played this game to completion but this video is inspiring
Would love to see Bed of Chaos’ combat wheel to know what the probability of doing that really rare fireball attack is
I don't quite understand... The combat wheel, sure, that's a utility reasoner. Decomposing a goal into subgoals, I'd like a concrete example here; A top goal like "Kill player" would probably decompose to "Keep appropriate distance", "Keep up sufficient health", "Turn the player's health to 0", etc., but when a set of goals is established, how is that translated into actions? Is there some deconfliction between goals?
really well made Tommy
I always thought there was rng involved with fighting in this game specifically bosses but it makes sense
For someone having done a lot of combat AI this is very interesting thank you so much for this video!
After regarding the video, there is common issue of Combat AI that I wonder how Dark Soul is handling:
1- Combat Positioning & Pacing: In a lot of games AI aren't allowed to attack at the same time. That often leads to weird situation were only one AI can attack at the same time and can feel very scripted to the player.
Do you know how Dark Soul is tackling that issue? Is that a ticket system? I already tried to records video on few Souls games, on noticed that they allow several AI to attack the player at the same time, but it still feel limited to 3/4 AI at max?
Also, I noticed that after attacks AI seems to have cooldown on its attack behavior as it will try to reposition sometimes after attacking while sometimes it will attack directly. I noticed that based on my behavior as a player, they would go more into reposition if I don't attack while if I attack or heal myself they start to become aggressive.
Do they have a sort of aggressivity system, or is it just part of the "combat wheel" you mention, with the recent player input being taking into account to select the next behavior?
2- Behavior Hysteresis: I wonder if there is any mechanics for the AI to keep its current behavior and not always switching to other behaviors? You mentionned with the combat wheel that the probability for specific behavior are constantly being updated. By if that's the case, what prevent the AI for not always switching between a lot of different behaviors? Is the AI locked into a single behavior until the behavior is considered completed?
To give an example, if the AI is told: "When at more than 50 meters, you should go to the player position and do an Attack X", one common issue is that: If you allow the AI to change its behavior while doing the "Go To" action, while the AI is getting closer, you end up with a probability wheel that is going to change completely, meaning that the AI is likely to select something else while as a designer you would have want to keep that behavior for some time. And on the opposite side, if you never allow the behavior to change until completion, you risk the issue that due to some fact, the behavior took time to perform (for example the "Go To" didn't go as expected like the player as moved away) and its not relevant at all anymore and the AI should be switching to something else.
Do you know if there is trick that Dark Soul AI is doing to tackle this issue? :)
Again thanks a lot for the video, it is very good material!
Enemies "respawning" dead and re-ragdolling feels thematically very appropriate for Dark Souls.
Does Solaire (I think he'd be the only one) use one of the two combat scripts (overworld vs. summoned) when he's encountered as an enemy in between the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, or is there a different AI configuration for that encounter?
He does have at least two scripts (overworld and summoned) but I need to double check my notes as I wouldn't be surprised if he has a third combat script for when he's a red phantom.
i just got your video of Far Cry recommended from 7 years ago, i just had to subscribe
Fantastic video.
just found this and hope to see more since i subbed, great video and cannot wait for bloodbornes vid, a game where i still need to beat the orphan and have yet to do so XD
Well done ,good sir.👏
Hi, Great video, I wondering what tools can see AI code of dark souls?
great video!!!
This was fuckin sick man!
I hope one day we get a BluePoint treatment for all of them
Cool now I can blame the RNG for me being bad...
How did I miss this one! Super interesting. I might have to experiment with a Fluid HGN now 😅
I thought you might enjoy this one! 😁
Ah, 2019 was when I first played ds1, and to this day I've since played through the game numerous times on both pc and on my switch, hell, I had half a mind to get the ptde edition on ps3 just because.
funny that 2 uses a different engine, because it feels entirely soulsborne to me. its actually my favorite from game! i didnt know the engine was a different one.
While it's a separate engine, it started as a branch of their existing Souls engine. So it's not surprising it still 'feels' like Dark Souls over though it went a different direction.
Sort of like how Call of Duty for many years was built with different versions of their engine that started as branches from Call of Duty 4. They're all Call of Duty but you can easily tell which games were Infinity Ward versus Treyarch given how they feel.
@@AIandGames good points :)
Very interesting video! This sounds much like how a combination of a behavior tree (allowing for hierarchical tasks) and a utility system (for randomness) would work. Is this different from that combination in some way?
I think yes, you could do it like that. I think the one benefit of this approach, is how data driven it is. Behaviours can be added or removed very easily in the Lua script, which might be a little more laborious with Behaviour Trees given you might need to go in and edit them all manually. But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how a lot of Soulslikes (notably things like Lords of the Fallen) have done it over the years.
almost sure that it is
the bosses in the megaman zero games, which arent FGs, but was made by none other than capcom, work in a rather similar fashion, if not almost the same but adapted for the good ol' GBA hardware and the fact that the boss design phylosophy is different (MMZ relies quite a bit more in randomness and true set patterns. Not to mention things having to lighter and simpler due to the hardware at hand)
I love Dark Spuls, and it sure changed a lot for the industry and it’s no secret that tons of games have taken inspiration from it…
But, that being said… saying it’s one of the best games of all time is a little bit of a stretch. I think a majority of FROM players will rank it under Elden Ring, Bloodborne, DS3, and Sekiro. Not only that, the last 1/2 or 1/3 of the game is objectively much worse and even felt to be unfinished when compared to the beginning half.
DS1 is revolutionary for the genre and gaming in general, but unfortunately it falls short when compared to pretty much every other game FROM went on to make (and many of the games inspired by it such as Stellar Blade, Lies of P, Star Wars, etc).
As an indie dev trying to make a soulslike, this video is a goldmine of information for planning out enemy and Fauna AI systems
Hi,
Please forgive what will likely be a longer comment than most. With subtlety & nuance being in rare supply online, I try to be as clear as possible. But my blunt nature is often mistaken for arrogance or condescension. Which is never my intention. As that's pointless when trying to communicate with anyone.
I am but a scrubby indie dev. Who's chosen to focus on systems design. I've been learning UE for 5 years this November. I'm also legally blind (albinism = 20/200 vision). In 2020 I strained my eyes to a point of functional blindness. I could still see. However keeping my eyes open for any length of time caused me physical pain.
So from June 2020 to June 2021 I was basically blind. All I could do was listen to Caverns & Creature audiobooks & the UE tutorials on loop. Which also gave me a lot of time to think. The technicalities, limitations & realties of game development are wildly misunderstood online. Often leading to name brand gamers innocently spreading misleading information.
I thought it was an issue of language. As in game development using common phrases. But "Optimization" means something different in game development. In comparison to the way "Optimization" is used in gaming discourse. Online the term is often reduced to "X game is poorly optimized because it can't hit 60 fps."
So when my vision finally recovered. I set out to listen to gamers and take notes. What do gamers want? What type of systems do they dislike? Things like that. It didn't take long to realize how misunderstood making games is. Or that well meaning TH-camrs are often the source of rumors like "60 fps is standard."
For the record. Yes, 60 fps is great. But out of the 1300+ 9th gen games 39% run at 60. If 60 was indeed a standard, we should see something like 45-51% of games running 60. I've talked to 12 AAA devs on the matter. Every last one agrees 60 is better. Every last one also acknowledged the technicities, limitations & realities that can make it impossible for every game to hit a solid 60.
My point... I absolutely love your channel. There are plenty of people analyzing games. But your combination of in depth break downs. And practical experience is well priceless. Because if gaming discourse is every to improve. We need more than the often surface level information being presented as facts.
I've found Ai and Games, No Clip & Game From Scratch to be the best sources for solid information on TH-cam. And just wanted to take a moment to thank you for this video. As well as the rest of your body of work.
Take care and have a good one
Mhm you don't put much stake in Digital Foundry? Sometimes interesting material.
Yes 30 is standard on console for the time being but something vaguely close to 60 for the same games is a common expectation on PC, with esports being expected to hit at least 90. Of course "what PC" and "what settings" is the question and that's a moving target, obviously, and yes quite a few people have sort of excessive expectations, like if already Medium-High settings are console-equivalent and fully preserve artistic vision, there's absolutely no point demanding good performance on Ultra settings on midrange hardware, it sort of makes sense for PC ports to offer settings that only start making sense on future hardware. Sometimes compromises and exceptions are OK, but it has to make a lower framerate worth your while somehow, and games that underperform are definitely a thing.
It's particularly painful when you have this game, Dark Souls, it came out on PS3 and Xbox360 targeting 30 (with a hit or miss success), which is fine, understandable, difficult to expect more; but then coming to PC they haven't taken out the 30fps limit, and it was painful, given even a 2007 PC with a Core2Quad CPU and a Geforce 8800 variant will run circles around those consoles and should be able to hit 60 at around 900p resolutions or higher running the same workload, and people were used to just about all games ported from these systems to be able to run unlocked framerate or at least limited to 60 on PC instead of 30, and a PC of that era was usually good for that as well. Yes it's a significant amount of work to adjust a 33ms fixed timestep engine, but when paying full retail price for a port that comes a year late, it's an effort that one would expect. The GPU performance was also a little lower than one may expect given again the Xbox360 origin of the game.
And a fair expectation is also when a PS3 or Xbox360 game gets ported to newer much more powerful consoles, that it should target 60fps as well, since it's developed against older less heavyweight rendering and simulation techniques and doesn't have to compete head on with the newest games.
A stable framerate is generally more important than hitting 60. Well assuming you can get above like 25, 60fps is just the best standard monitors will do and a benchmark for something running extra good. Although it depends on the hardware whether running sub 60 un-capped is an issue, if I (or a reviewer) has a high end pc and the game runs at like 40 fps its not a good sign or if your game is very simple and it runs at like 30 (uncapped) on midrange set up. Its not necessarily the end of the world but it doesn't make you look great as a dev and depending who the dev is people may expect better. Having said all that, gamers can be big babies about it and if you want to cap your game at 30 then it won't be noticed by most, nor do small time devs catch as much flak for poor optimisation assuming its playable.
@SianaGearz darksouls has to be capped, fps is tied to game speed, and if you run it faster than intended things get weird. I don't think they considered a pc release when they made it
@@CAMSLAYER13 There are two ways to handle this type of conversion.
One is to decouple the presentation from simulation, and introduce a non-invasive presentation interpolation system. This can be done by a 3-4 person expert team in a handful months on a fixed-framerate engine. People like nixxes and bluepoint are quite versed in this.
The other is to introduce the new fixed framerate of 60. It does require a substantial fine tuning of physics and scripting to make sure it's working as intended, plus QA overhead. They have after all done this for the Remaster.
It's actually a common strategy for console games which aren't too complex to run simulation at 60 and presentation at 30 (fixed frameskip), so they can get 60 in future releases without much effort. Specific scripts and subsystems can have fractional invocation rates such as 30, 20, or much less to make it fit within original CPU budget.
As i said, year late and full price, you do hope for more than the bare minimum effort. It's not an absolute killer criterium but to me and many others it does make a difference between paying full price right ahead and waiting till it's deeply discounted.
Oscar isn't real. He's credited as "Nameless Knight".
ah someone sees the elden ring search bonus coming
Y'know, I honestly never thought about it! I've still not played Elden Ring, so I'm completely oblivious to anything related to the DLC update. :D
@@AIandGamesoh my God tommy ... Let's get this man some vacation time so he can play elden ring😂
Ummm, yeah before we get to that, I need to play Dark Souls 3, Sekiro and the Demon's Souls remake! :D
@@AIandGames elden ring has the most advanced boss ai
@@Ghorda9 Said no one ever.
I'm wondering if Thousand Land might be where fromsoft started doing this type of AI. It centers around AI driven units that carry out tasks th-cam.com/video/CRi7TBELlAg/w-d-xo.html Another possibility is that they weren't satisfied with the AI of early armored core games, where enemy cores could have some huge number of configurations and having to manually make finite state machines for all of them.
I always imagined Dark Souls AI boiled down to "walk to the player and play random relevant attack animation depending on range and/or specific animation states the player is in", because that's roughly how it seems to work in the actual game.
I wonder if it was something they already had in the engine for previous games or maybe they wanted to build some system a la Radiant for NPCs, because it sounds like a huge overkill for monsters.
Games are usually more intricate than ppl think. Even with loads of abstraction in higher level programming languages, there is generally a lot of trial/error involved.
@@Retrofire-47 I mean, I am a game developer and I know that games are even more of a mess than normal software.
What I'm saying is, it's very unlikely they designed their AI system from the ground up to achieve, well, what the Souls actually achieve because it's a huge overkill. So there must be some other reason for such complexity.
@@AliceLoverdrive tbf, the way he is describing it makes it seem a lot more complicated than the actual implementation probably actually is.
Agreed. If this is the system they came up with, it's WAY over-engineered for the actual end result. It's significantly easier to read, even the modern Souls games, than what this system seems designed to do. And largely these mechanics could've been designed using far simpler solutions that would've undoubtedly been far more performant.
@@desmondbrown5508 Could you elaborate, please?
this video inspired me to learn game AI. i'm currently learning it DIY using applied OOP. right now it seems really basic, but all i have is a method which operates upon an 'Alien' class to alter its internal state property, based upon certain game conditions.
So my current experiment is to change the state to "pursue" if the player is within a certain proximity, then use a vector to navigate towards them.
I wonder if any fighting games have similar scripting as I imagine they have similar needs for shifting rng wheels like this
Yes to my knowledge some fighting games do have similar behavioural structures.
I’d love for you to check out the AI director from 40K DarkTide.
Me too
So what is the Dark Souls of AI? 😉
Very good.
wether an item has been used by the player?! I knew they hit me for healing :D
Yes! One of the conditions that can activate an attack goal is when the target has starting healing. I was beyond angry, but also relieved, to discover this was the case.
absolutely! it‘s not just my imagination :) fascinating how behavior like this can be achieved! I‘m sure many players felt this.
Definitely appears more in the later games too...
Lautrec fights way differently than solaire ive noticed
no boss battle fights the same way twice? might i introduce you to the dragon rider from ds2?
Agreed, but also, most boss fights are fought the same way (or VERY similarly) each time. If the concept of 'no two fights are the same' is that they literally didn't use the exact same pattern of attacks from one fight to the next that's a very very low bar to pass that almost every video game in existence (even Hollow Knight, which wasn't even made by technical programmers at all) hits.
The soulsborne games will forever be dear to me! 🫡
"the _ability_ to lose your accrued souls at the point of death..." lmao
I like to think of death as but a choice.
Would you say this video is a good place to begin understanding AI in game design?
i rather enjoyed it. I'm wondering if there is another video you've released which is more generalized
Thanks for watching. I'd recommend checking out my AI 101 playlist. I tend to deal with high-level descriptions of methodologies in that series, and then point to specific episodes I've made which go into more detail.
@@AIandGames Do you think the 101 series could help a fledgling indie game dev?
I know it has helped people in the past. If you're looking at specific game design ideas, then watching episodes focussed on games similar to your interests will also be useful..
@@AIandGames Thanks dude.
you were pretty far ahead of the curve, in terms of covering the subject
@@Retrofire-47you ain't a dev kid
Oscar's family saying should be shorter, like Live, Love, seek the eternal flame
Kind of amazing that fallen order looks to dark souls for its combat, has several years of better tech and a whole series of games to base it on, yet still made probably the worst combat in a game I've seen in years.
Thwy have solved it to a huge extent in Jedi Survivor. But some problwms yet remain
Cool video bro, what prompt did you use?
???
Shield + prick work well in any Dark soul game
3:20 I dont think Sekiro fits into this, it has nothing to do with "soulslikes" its more a straightforward action game. A different thing like armored core not part of this.
Sekiro bosses and nps and enemies had same AI, lol, what you talking about?
Plz do the ai of tom clancys the division the lmb soldiers tactics are si cool
There are already 5 videos on the channel covering The Division and The Division 2.
Doesn't dark souls use Sony's PhyreEngine?
Elden Ring AI: Input Reading.
Prepare to die by simple AI.
I have since been proven wrong! :D
so darks souls AI is more bottom up than top down basically?
I'd argue it's the opposite. The goal planner is very much top down, but the behaviour definitions and their probability distributions make it *feel* bottom-up in practice.
@@AIandGames oh ok
how can you explore somenthing that almost nonexistent.
The hundreds of AI scripting files suggest otherwise.
I really like this 😛💣💚
gg
The one exception is dark souls 2, of course it fuckin is. It was a weird time ok, we try and forget about it. Its best if people just don't mention it.
remastered ds1 looks so bad T_T they still haven't fixed the broken leg animations during rolls lmaooo
There is no AI in Souls. The enemy chooses an uninterruptible attack move which you need to dodge or get fked and then it is vulnerable as a static dummy for a few seconds where you can attack. Rinse and repeat.
Lot of talking a coping to dance around how the ai is just really stupid and just throwing random bs to confuse stupid people. It a well know concept that the human brain dose not process random very well and like bad gamblers gamers prefer to throw them selves at a problem Arlen brute force it. Stupid ai for stupid players.
That's what the "wheel" visual is all about. Bad players will treat every action as opaquely random, and wait until the boss swings to begin their reaction. Good players will corral the boss into more predictable paths by standing at a certain distance, angle, etc. so they (mostly) know what the boss is gonna do before he does it.
@@jamesarthurkimbell "enemy will execute a close range attack if you are in close range and a mid range attack if you are in mid range with some attacks being rare and some common" isn't a particularly hard concept to grasp and isn't unique to Souls games, though?
@@AliceLoverdrive I agree, it's not unique, and it shouldn't be surprising. But in practice, that's what happens. People ask "how do you dodge X attack?" or they complain "Y attack is unreactable!" without stepping back to address how we get there.
I think there's a misuse of the point you made.
It's not that the brain doesn't process random well that causes problem here.
It's that the brain will consider something as random if it fails to understand the patterns involved. So even though the patterns are rarely random, it will feel random to those that don't get it.
Nothing random about their attacks
Do Metal gear solid 5 next