16th February 2004, 2:19 PM
To be honest I wish they kept Secret's weapon switching. It was as simple as going into the ring menu for weapons and selecting it like that. Same with magic. That made selecting spells and weapons VERY easy, regardless of having to pause the game to do it. The way they put item magic and weapon seleciton into SUB rings didn't help. Yes it's nice to have hotkeys, but considering that before it was only one level deep and now it's two, it's still awkward to get to it.
AI? Well, actually I too have a problem with it because the AI for characters actually seems worse than Secret. Secret wasn't stellar or anything, and you couldn't leave your characters behind, but they were intelligent enough to back away from the fight until they were ready and THEN rush in to attack. Actually, considering there's no weapon charging in this game, that might explain it. The characters wouldn't have any easy to program trigger to go into "defend" behavior. That would explain why they get themselves whenever they decide to attack. Perhaps a flag could have been set up so that whenever they did a combo, or attempted one, they should run away and stay back for a set amount of time, based on their aggresiveness setting, and THEN run back in. However, the rest of their AI seems similar to Secret and it's pretty much as good as one can expect. We aren't AT such an amazing level yet that we could actually expect AI that can determine paths anywhere near as good as humans. Honestly I'm surprised at how well they DO manage to path, that they actually know they need to not only move AROUND an obstacle, but sometimes AWAY from the lead character for a bit to get around said obstacle, is actually very impressive. They get stuck if they need to go a significant distance away from the leader, but that's just because it's AI, not I. When we reach I, then we'll have to feel guilty about turning off our systems :D. Basically, it's only not as good as Secret because the battle system in Secret was the main trigger used to determine battle behavior, and in Secret, that battle system was perfect for AI fighting to base it's behavior off of. Generally, after tweaking with the aggressive/distance settings a bit and how far they should charge the weapons, I found my allies could really help me out in combat, so long as I did a good job leading them into position. Of course, they don't use magic or items or switch weapons on their own, but that's due to them being mere bots. They aren't adaptive at all, and the amount of code that would be needed to actually get them to determine what type of weapon or magic or item to use in a given situation would be FAR too immense. LL's right, you really can't knock AI until you've tried making some yourself, and realize you have to program AI in totally different and unrelated ways depending on what you are trying to get it to do. Deep Blue the chess master for instance is programmed totally differently than the upcoming Poker game master, and that's just because of the differences between the two games, namely that deep blue has perfect information at all times on the locations of every single piece, while the other one has imperfect information, only knowing the cards it has and not knowing what cards the opponent has or what's coming next in the deck. Doesn't sound like a big difference, but reading about what I have it quickly becomes apparent on how utterly different the best style to handle those two games are from each other.
I'll only add that this doesn't defend them from the whole thing with the AI killing itself on those barrier sphere things like ABF was talking about. It would have been a simple enough thing to do to tell the AI that those are NOT targets and they would have ignored them completely (meaning if they were standing next to them for some OTHER reason, they would still get attacked over and over again, but still they wouldn't be walking TO them at least :D).
AI? Well, actually I too have a problem with it because the AI for characters actually seems worse than Secret. Secret wasn't stellar or anything, and you couldn't leave your characters behind, but they were intelligent enough to back away from the fight until they were ready and THEN rush in to attack. Actually, considering there's no weapon charging in this game, that might explain it. The characters wouldn't have any easy to program trigger to go into "defend" behavior. That would explain why they get themselves whenever they decide to attack. Perhaps a flag could have been set up so that whenever they did a combo, or attempted one, they should run away and stay back for a set amount of time, based on their aggresiveness setting, and THEN run back in. However, the rest of their AI seems similar to Secret and it's pretty much as good as one can expect. We aren't AT such an amazing level yet that we could actually expect AI that can determine paths anywhere near as good as humans. Honestly I'm surprised at how well they DO manage to path, that they actually know they need to not only move AROUND an obstacle, but sometimes AWAY from the lead character for a bit to get around said obstacle, is actually very impressive. They get stuck if they need to go a significant distance away from the leader, but that's just because it's AI, not I. When we reach I, then we'll have to feel guilty about turning off our systems :D. Basically, it's only not as good as Secret because the battle system in Secret was the main trigger used to determine battle behavior, and in Secret, that battle system was perfect for AI fighting to base it's behavior off of. Generally, after tweaking with the aggressive/distance settings a bit and how far they should charge the weapons, I found my allies could really help me out in combat, so long as I did a good job leading them into position. Of course, they don't use magic or items or switch weapons on their own, but that's due to them being mere bots. They aren't adaptive at all, and the amount of code that would be needed to actually get them to determine what type of weapon or magic or item to use in a given situation would be FAR too immense. LL's right, you really can't knock AI until you've tried making some yourself, and realize you have to program AI in totally different and unrelated ways depending on what you are trying to get it to do. Deep Blue the chess master for instance is programmed totally differently than the upcoming Poker game master, and that's just because of the differences between the two games, namely that deep blue has perfect information at all times on the locations of every single piece, while the other one has imperfect information, only knowing the cards it has and not knowing what cards the opponent has or what's coming next in the deck. Doesn't sound like a big difference, but reading about what I have it quickly becomes apparent on how utterly different the best style to handle those two games are from each other.
I'll only add that this doesn't defend them from the whole thing with the AI killing itself on those barrier sphere things like ABF was talking about. It would have been a simple enough thing to do to tell the AI that those are NOT targets and they would have ignored them completely (meaning if they were standing next to them for some OTHER reason, they would still get attacked over and over again, but still they wouldn't be walking TO them at least :D).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)