My main point is that people say they want "proper AI", but if you gave it to them, almost nobody would buy it. Not enough to fund development at least. The most likely result of
trying to shoe-horn "good AI" into a game would be something that's only marginably playable. There isn't actually any proven benefit to gameplay other than being able to wank on about how the AI is realistic.
Also my point wasn't whether AI is cheating or not, is that not having the cheating AI doesn't actually prevent accusations of having cheating AI. Sure, there are "ways to detect whether the AI is really cheating" but the vast majority of people making any sort of internet accusations haven't actually done any checks.
Not to mention that scaling difficulty with a really good AI wouldnt be that difficult.... just ramp down their available resources
Th
Not to mention that scaling difficulty with a really good AI wouldnt be that difficult.... just ramp down their available resources
That's just not correct. Complex simulation code is very rife with non-linear problems. You're likely to get unexpected shit happening. It's not like people haven't
tried this, it's that it's doomed to failure. Game developers need to ship product, and they need to ship it in a moderate time-frame, it needs to ship tuned and balanced as best as possible. Putting expermental, random, complex and unpredictable code such as solid AI, which is usually NNs of some sort is a fool's errand, if you're expected to pay employees. If you're a single indie dev with no employees and preferably no spouse/children to pay for, go for it then. Meanwhile, if you're someone making something and other people's livelihoods and families actually depend on the product succeeding, steer clear of "magic bullet" AI "solutions" to the problem of building a game.
In the real world, real-life experience is that if someone leading your dev team has some wild idea for some cool AI that's going to drive everything, it
almost always fails and goes to shit. Pretty much every one of those examples of game AI that didn't live up to expectations was
because someone had your idea about using "real" AI and went with it, and the shitty shit that doesn't live up to the "hype" is exactly what you get when you try that. The promise of "real AI" is that it's going to be this magic sauce that makes everything clever and fun and balanced, and you won't have to hand-craft or kludge anything. If such a thing ever worked, they'd all be doing it rather than kludges. Nobody wants to hand-balance a complex game and add a zillion kludges to make it work. It's very time-consuming.
They always end up either stripping that whole system out and replace it with some extremely kludgy code that is worse than what they would have used if they'd just hand-scripted everything from the start, or they pile kludges
on top of the "magic AI" that was supposed to solve all the problems, and you get a system people will be complaining for for years to come.