The Genius AI Behind The Sims
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- Опубліковано 5 чер 2024
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The Sims uses a super smart AI system to make virtual people who think, feel, and interact in a believable way. Here's how.
=== Sources and Resources ===
- Footnotes
(1) Most numbers in this video are for illustrative purposes only, and do not necessarily represent the values in any The Sims game.
(2) In The Sims 3, the "Comfort" and "Room" motives are removed, leaving six basic needs. These are instead represented by "Moodlets", which are little boosts and nerfs to the Sim's happiness for doing things like sitting in a comfy chair or walking into a smelly room.
(3) The Sims are strictly male and female in the first three games, but The Sims 4 expands this with the ability to individually set a character's appearance, pronouns, and more.
- Sources
[1] Those Darned Sims: What Makes Them Tick? | GDC Vault
www.gdcvault.com/play/1013969...
[2] Will Wright explains what The Sims and an ant colony have in common | Joystiq
web.archive.org/web/201112181...
[3] Simulation and Modeling: Under the hood of The Sims | Northwestern University
users.cs.northwestern.edu/~fo...
[4] Some notes on programming objects in The Sims | Northwestern University
[PDF] www.qrg.northwestern.edu/pape...
[5] JustJakeSimpson | Twitter
JustJakeSimpson/s...
[6] Needs-Based AI | Robert Zubek
[PDF] robert.zubek.net/publications/...
[7] Traits | The Sims Wiki
sims.fandom.com/wiki/Category...)
[8] Modeling Individual Personalities in The Sims 3 | GDC Vault
• Modeling Individual Pe...
[9] AI Development Postmortems: Inside DARKSPORE and THE SIMS: MEDIEVAL | GDC Vault
www.gdcvault.com/play/1014569...
[10] Emergent Storytelling Techniques in The Sims | GDC Vault
• Emergent Storytelling ...
[11] Will Wright Teaches Game Design and Theory | MasterClass
www.masterclass.com/classes/w...
[12] The Sims Design Documents | Various
linkedbyair.net/bin/The%20Sim...
www.gamedev.net/tutorials/gam...
web.archive.org/web/201708131...
[13] AI Postmortems: Assassin's Creed III, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Warframe | GDC Vault
www.gdcvault.com/play/1018058...
- Additional resources
AI Made Easy with Utility AI | Medium
/ ai-made-easy-with-util...
Improving AI Decision Modeling Through Utility Theory | GDC Vault
www.gdcvault.com/play/1012410...
An Introduction to Utility Theory | Game AI Pro
[PDF] www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro/Ga...
Knowledge is Power: An Overview of Knowledge Representation in Game AI | GDC
www.gdcvault.com/play/1025172...
=== Chapters ===
00:00 - Intro
01:26 - Decision Making 101
03:43 - Advanced Decision Making
06:52 - Utility AI
07:51 - Unique Sims
09:50 - Social Situations
11:09 - Hard-coded Rules
13:00 - Background Sims
15:35 - Storytelling
19:51 - Conclusion
=== Games Shown ===
The Sims 2 (2005)
The Sims 4 (2014)
The Sims 3 (2009)
The Sims (2000)
SimAnt (1991)
The Sims: Unleashed (2002)
The Sims Medieval (2011)
SimCity 2000 (1993)
Middle-earth: Shadow of War (2017)
XCOM: Enemy Within (2013)
Minecraft (2011)
=== Credits ===
Music provided by Epidemic Sound - www.epidemicsound.com/referra... (Referral Link)
Music from The Sims OST, by Jerry Martin
Music from The Sims 3 OST, by Steve Jablonsky and Pieter A. Schlossern
=== Subtitles ===
Contribute translated subtitles - amara.org/videos/cVoJS4OdmVql/ - Ігри
Want more deep-dive explanations into video game AI? Check out this video about how Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system works - ua-cam.com/video/Lm_AzK27mZY/v-deo.html
I love when the ground-breaking AI makes my sims wash their dishes in the bathroom sink.
No A.I. is perfect
@@randomguy6679 Sims don't have AI. They make the most stupid annoying things and repeat it all the time like making push ups all the time 100x a day in every situation
@@vomm Thats still A.I., even if it’s stupid.
@@randomguy6679 But it's not genius or "not perfect", it's crap and totally broken.
@@vomm That’s not what you said though. You initially said that it wasn’t A.I., and now you’re turning your back on that statement.
I was an AI programmer on The Sims Medieval (which was based on The Sims 3) and the lead AI programmer on The Sims 4. This is pretty spot-on! There's more to it of course, but the core of the AI system is just as described here.
Things like visiting other sims were called Situations which helped define some of those rules. They weren't hard-coded, we managed it all with buffs, mostly created by designers. Buffs can be thought of as tags and you could have tests on interactions that said "don't allow someone with this buff to do this thing". So if you visited another sim, you got a visiting buff which prevented you from doing things that were inappropriate. You could also be invited to stay over, which was a different buff that relaxed many of those rules. Beds were a special case; they were owned by different sims so you would never autonomously use someone else's bed unless you were very close (like romantically involved).
Socials on The Sims 4 were governed by a special autonomy mode called subaction autonomy, which was a much simpler weighted random compared to the complex utility system of full autonomy. Designers would tune each social and weights for things like reactions and which social was chosen. Weights were adjusted by traits, buffs, and the short-term context (the short-term companion to the long-term relationship score). Short-term context models things like "I love my wife, but I'm pissed at her right now", though in practice it was more like "this conversation is tanking" or "this is a really funny conversation". For example, when you're laughing and joking around with your friends, you're more likely to laugh at jokes than if you're just told a joke out of nowhere. This is even more true if everyone is laughing (that's why sitcoms have a laugh track).
For things like venues (restaurants and so on), we used the same core system. It's a Situation under the covers. Meta autonomy pulls in sims to fulfill different roles based on filters. It tries to use existing sims but if it can't, it creates a new sim. Townies are sims that don't live in any specific lot in the world. Any sim you can interact with are fully simulated. The auto-satisfy curves are used when you, the player, enter a lot with a bunch of sims that are already there. We use that to determine starting motives. The low LOD simulation is very, very light. It's mostly just story progression (getting a new job, promotion, etc.)
One thing the video talks about at the end is the ambiguity of the AI. This was very intentionally designed. Sims need to be reactive and always living in the moment. So while you might have a sim with an ambition to be a movie star, very little actually causes them to do that. They might enjoy movies more, for example, but not much else. Sims don't plan in any way. They run an AI tick and choose something to do based on motives, traits, mood, and so on. We've experimented with planning, but it caused confusion because players didn't know why their sim was doing what they were doing. Playtesters felt like they didn't have as much control.
Simlish was created by Stephen Kearin and Gerri Lawlor, two incredibly talented improvisers. I recommend looking them up, they're both awesome! (I've been doing improv for many, many years and I've had the pleasure of working with Stephen on several occasions.)
Sims being gay or bi vs straight is not entirely for storytelling, it's because of other countries. The design is that if you never ever initiate any gay content, you will never see gay content. This helped us get around laws in countries like Russia. That said, the video is correct that your player-controlled sim will never romance another sim, though non-player controlled sims can get married through story progression. Still, you won't see two men or two women get married unless you directly make it happen because of this issue.
There is a sort-of yes, and idea in the sims, but it's less designed than you might think. Basically, we have a set of interactions that can never be done autonomously, like quitting your job, getting married, and so on. We have the player make the big life decisions while the AI takes care of the rest.
If anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer them.
I've been modding the game for years, and it's funny to recognize a lot of these terms from seeing them all over the code. It's actually a very neat example of how object-based programming can give you a lot of variety.
I do have one question, if you can answer it: By now (through leaks and datamining) we know the game was meant to have a multiplayer element on launch. How late in development was that scratched and did it affect the development of other features at all?
" The design is that if you never ever initiate any gay content, you will never see gay content."
Reminds me of those people complaining about seeing gay ads, only to be told "you only get gay ads because you search for gay things".
@@pedro_mabI believe player to player agency probably conflicts with the AI and kind subverts the goals of the game.
I’ve always viewed SIMs as a triage system that has “negative” algorithmic results if neglected or “positive” algorithmic results if efficient.
I wonder how a multiplayer changes the incentives to the game if those algorithms are nulled by player to player intention.
Personally, I feel it removes the dopamine loop. But if they used the engine as a “machinema” engine for story telling, that’d probably make a great multiplayer element and content churn.
@@asddsa8203 Ooooooh, that's why my cities are always so progressive, because in Sims I'm always a lesbian. It makes sense now.
I have a million questions. I got into game dev because of AI. But now that someone with legit credentials is here, I can't think of anything! I'll just sub you and maybe ask sometime in the future. Yay learning!
Fun fact: Every Sim is actually controlled by a minimum wage EA employee
a man working on barely any pay to feed his family watching his assigned sim get drowned in a swimming pool for the sixtieth time
Nah, they'd outsource it to Cambodia and pay them a dollar a day.
thank you monkeeee
So, Caith Sith?
And if the sim dies, so does the employee
My favourite part of the genius Sims AI is when visitors just go play games on your Sim's laptop
The best part is that said game actually tends to be a previous Sims game too
I fight back, I'm the bad visitor. I sleep in other people's deckchairs after eating raw their vegetables and fruits straight from the plants. Sims 3 of course...
@@CiromBreeze Simception...
good ol block stack 'ems
I got so pissed when they did that
My favorite thing about sims AI is the way they choose the furthest sink they can get to wash dishes rather than using the one that is literally right next to them in the kitchen where they eat
Yep my sims do this when they want to sit down for anything. Like they’ll walk past the living room coach to go sit in the kitchen for no reason lmao
well, the other sink offered them a bigger reward in terms of the whole hand-washing experience
The insane trait is the best one because of the fact that it overrides ALL parameters! Leading to crazy situations like romancing the Grim Reaper or fishing in swimming pools!
Not for us! hahahah! I had to fix SO MANY bugs on The Sims Medieval because of that decision from The Sims 3. It literally just overrode all tests everywhere.
@@rezination lol True I read from an article once that you guys found out how broken it was when the Executioner kept on fighting the Pit Monster!
@@AngraMainiiu yep! That was the specific bug that made us realize the issue. I spoke about it at GDC one year. :)
hahaha I'm a monster it had 420 likes and I made it 421
just like in real life lol
When The Sims 2 came out, the Grim Reaper was programmed to perform an action at random after reaping the last sim on a lot. While the reaper performed that action, the timer would expire and the game-over screen would at last pop up.
Somewhere on a hard drive from a computer I replaced in 2006, there's a screenshot I took of the Grim Reaper taking a dump in my sim's toilet after I'd killed off said sim in a fit of divine wrath.
I was playing The Sims 2 recently and I fell asleep, my character starved to death. When I woke up, the Grim Reaper was on the couch watching TV.
@@JolgeableLol!!
This also happens in Sims 3, somewhere I had a screenshot of Grim Reaper reading a newspaper while taking a dump.
trying to wohoo the grim reaper is always a fun pasttime, which would not work, if they didn't stay in your home. 😅
I absolutely love when wacky things like this happen in The Sims! I’ve always tried to keep my gameplay pretty realistic, but I can’t help but just laugh when things like this happen. You can tell EA had a lot of fun with Grim back in the day (especially in TS2)
It is very true that ambiguity and randomness allows people to fill the gaps with their imagination and it makes game characters look smarter or more complex than they really are.
Many years ago I made a simple 2D action game in which the enemies could do a number of things, like run towards the player, escape from the player, take cover behind an object, shoot, jump, etc... and they just pick one at random. It wasn't deeper than that. Some tester was very excited at the "complexity" of those enemies and shouted: "they are learning from my behaviour!". What was totally not true, but made me very happy.
I think the secret of game AI is not to make them actually intelligent, but to make the player think that they are.
Game AI is an illusion for sure. The best AI is as simple as possible, but no simpler. We had a lot of complexity on the Sims, but we also had a lot of simplicity. In one of my talks, I said something to effect of "if your AI is indistinguishable from rand(), just call rand()".
"the secret of game AI is not to make them actually intelligent, but to make the player think that they are"
I would say "but to ALLOW the player to think they are". As a player, I already _want_ to believe the things in a game are alive. We automatically anthropomorphize our stuffed animals, boats, cars and such from an early age, and most of us keep doing it through adulthood. If nothing in a game keeps me from believing its people and creatures are "real", I will embrace that illusion. There's no need to trick me, I'll do the heavy lifting if the developer can keep the limitations of the platform from getting in my way.
I love when absolutely random events somehow lead to people believing that the AI is smart
Well I hope there not I would feel so horrible for them if they were
Absolutely, I still love the AI behavior in GRID 2 where they sometimes crash which makes me feel like the AI actually makes a wrong decision, unlike some modern racing games like Forza Horizon for example where the AI will take any turn perfectly without making any mistake.
This is the kind of stuff I love in game design. Behind the scenes, nothing but math. But with clever tweaking it comes together into an incredibly lifelike system.
Much like real life.
life isnt much different really
Psychological research.
it is really cool, isn't it? makes me take a double look at reality lol, and appreciate the nuances therein
I always really liked TS3’s AI. When a sim was hungry, they’d go eat on their own. If they were tired, they’d go to bed. If they were married, they’d have romantic interactions with their spouse. If a sim was a book worm, they’d always be reading. I remember my Sim staying over with a guy who was living with his two siblings, and on the first night he read one his siblings to bed automatically. I just love it when sims automatically do cute little things like that on their own. They still did stupid things of course, like always wanting to watch TV or go outside when it was raining, but if they didn’t then what’s the point of playing? And I adored the open world because even though I wasn’t playing with the other sims, they’d still be living their own lives. Some families would separate, the mother being single with two kids while the dad had to move in somewhere else. Or some sims would have a child while the father was living in another home. Some sims would adopt dogs or their kids would move out and live with someone else. I was so invested in what my townies were doing, I’d spend hours in edit town
sims 4 ai: i am going to cheat on my wife in front of her, spend every midnight learning to make drinks when i need to piss really bad everyday, leave dishes 1231km from where i ate it/from a sink, and do things i hate anytime i am excited.
I loved the sims 3, I don't know why they didn't much of what had been achieved there in Sims 4.
speaking of maxis, you should take a peep at spore 2008 and explain how the heck they managed to make all the creature parts move, dance, animate no mater what kinda monstrocity you make or how you can import other people's creations just by dragging and dropping in a .jpeg file into your game folder
Is your pic from the game Fuel? I still play that game. X)
Right. Rigging is one of the most important part of character animation. Maybe it was procedural animation. Its almost magic if you think about it.
Steganography. Though why they did that i've no idea. A simpler way would just to have put the creature data in a metadata field, like Macromedia Fireworks did to save entire projects into a png.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think Spore’s character creation was INCREDIBLY robust for when it was released. When I play one of my favorite things is to just watch how the parts move in accordance to each other. If they were able to do all that in 2008, imagine what they could do now.
What a great game, so sad they flopped it in the Space stage. It could have been the game of the century... :(
When I played sims 3 I somehow managed to make the entire household into "alcoholics", they would stop in the middle of tasks I set to go back to the juice bar. Once I decided one of the adults to take the kid camping in the mountains, when I looked back at the house he was already there at the juice bar and the kid was cycling home on his own.. great game
I love the fact that one of the most human things is to create stories about everything that happens, trying to explain, find patterns and reasons in everything. Even when we know it's pure math and events randomly generated by a computer.
Just like in the real world: there is no free will; things happen and then we make up stories about them.
our brains rly love to find patterns and meanings
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself This post "just happened". Tune in later for the "story".
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself That is a point of view highly associated to nihilism. I personally disagree on there not being a free will; there are things outside our realm of control, but we ultimately are capable of deciding what to do with what we're given, or even to create our own opportunities through action. Sure, those are just neurons firing up and chemical reactions prompting us to do specific things by creating our thoughts and motivations in the first place, but that sum of cells and everything is us. There is free will.
This really goes to show how complicated game development really is. Smth so seemingly simple and potentially randomized is in actuality dozens and dozens of systems working in tandem with eachother, crossing over, all in order to try and predict the unpredictable a.k.a the player's decisions (like the classic "removing the pool ladder")
And it even if it wasn't mentioned, it also illustrates how easily bugs can appear. With that many system, changing just one thing can butterfly and show effects far down the line.
The one thing I love about the Sims AI that you didn't pick up on, which is particularly clear in the Sims 4, is that while Sims can survive without you to achieve any sort of fulfilling growth they need your intervention. So bored Sims won't take up a hobby but will just sit and watch TV or game, it take player involvement to develop them into better human beings and ultimately 'win' the simulation
Yep! This is very much intentional.
He did pick up on it. The design was to not ruin the players story. 18:53
I completely (and respectfully) disagree. I think this is why 4 feels more like a dollhouse than a simulation for me, which bores me to no end; they barely have any autonomy.
I don't personally like micromanaging. I don't want to create a detailed backstory and personality for every (or any lol) sim I create and explicitly tell the game who they are. I want my sims to have SOME character development on their own. The game should learn who they are through my actions and the traits I've set and keep that momentum going, although not so much to be repetitive/robotic, and without asking for permission as with the implementation of likes/dislikes in 4 (although wayyy less aggressive; just because I was playing video games and happened to be in a bad mood doesn't mean I'd go scorched earth on the hobby entirely... but, you know, maybe mix it up a little? I think 3's wish system was an alright middle ground here).
Although every player is different, which I suppose is why 3 went for an autonomy slider instead of imposing the least interesting option on every single player.
Maybe try playing the game for more than 20 minutes and with more than 1 sim. Micromanaging every single member of an 8 sim family is a PAIN IN THE BUTT. I don't want them to sit there watching tv all day, I want them to try out new hobbies or talk to someone outside the house or learn a new skill without me having to tell them 5 times (bc the interactions keep cancelling).
Besides, lately they can't even keep themselves alive. They will be stinky and starving but napping on the bed instead of making food or even taking out a snack out of the fridge. Even when there's like 8 showers and 3 fridges. This game is broken and I'm sick of people pretending like it isn't.
@@rezinationhii😊
It is always so cool to learn how smart programmers solve these creative problems in games. I feel they don`t get nearly as much credit as they deserve.
We don't!
Uhm I mean, yup, they don't!
Just play the game, it's free now, you'll see how "correct" your statement is
I mean their great idea was to have a sim want to get married then immediately divorce afterwards. It's odd that they only give negative wants with relationships. But it's a broken trash game so can't expect any less for talentless shills.
18:35 I remember when I was younger and playing Sims 2 Pets, whenever the speech bubble showed what I thought looked like a spinning top (but was probably a radio dish), I always pretended that my sim was telling other sims his spinning top was better than theirs
The way simulation game players pick up on EVERYTHING in order to tell a story is so cool. Spore, for all its shallowness, builds on the same ideas of ambiguity and emergence to create a universe in the player's mind. A genius at that sort of thing was Parkaboy, an amazing creator who even implemented the game's constant malfunctions and crashes into his most prolific species' backstory as a cycle of devastating economical crises.
This is awesome and hilarious.
I played a while ago Silent Hunter 3. There were stories of some patrol runs and the crew members and their fate :D
Honestly, I would love it if I could sit back and do nothing while playing the Sims. I want them to be able to build relationships, develop hobbies, and take care of themselves without me. Then I could just swoop in occasionally as a benevolent (or hostile) deity
There are some mods that increase the Sims' free will, which could be fun to play with
I'd play a game where the Sims are trying to live their best life, and I'm just here to create havok among them.
@@leopsm12223 Absolute ingenious idea. The goal would be to change their fates just by creating happy little accidents. I don't know if it's possible but it would make a great game if done right.
The Sims 3 and The Sims medieval both had something internal that allowed that was never surfaced to the player. It was used for testing mostly, so we could leave the game running on speed 3 for weeks at a time, which would simulate multiple SIM years and whole generations of sims.
I mentioned wanting to add this for The Sims 4 but it was shot down for a number of reasons. One of the big ones was the testing burden because it's quite difficult to get that to feel right and balanced and it was thought that a minority of players would want it anyway.
Maybe you could turn it around on its head- a sim is making a nice cheese sandwich, only for me to suddenly interfere and make the cheese stale, or start a fire
The Sims team is a good example of how a good team can exist inside of a terrible company.
Kinda tbh... EA wasn't terrible when Maxis was in their golden era. And well, now Maxis doesn't even exist and all of the Sims' original designers are gone from the franchise.
@@emit...That's what happens on most game teams. With a such a long running game. It's expected that all of the designers are gone. They are on to something different. Creatives want to design new games, it's not like they weren't driven away. It's not a unique or even bad thing.
When I worked on The Sims Medieval and The Sims 4, there was a producer there that had been with EA since before they were a game company. Our lead gameplay programmer had worked on The Sims Online, but I think that was the oldest of the programmers. Most had worked on The Sims 3 and a few had worked on The Sims 2. @bistander is correct, this is typical with any game company.
I worked for Maxis at two points: once in 1998 as a QA tester and once then later in the 2010's for about 4.5 years as an engineer. It felt very much the same. We all wore our Maxis shirts with pride (I still wear mine) and were referred to, even internally, as Maxis. The Sims is also one of the top selling franchises in EA, so were mostly left to do what we wanted (for good and bad). Maxis can be thought of kinda like Bioware; we're apart of EA but mostly left alone as long as we produce. At least, that's what it felt like as an engineer. We had good producers who probably shielded us from a lot.
@@rezination happy to hear you guys weren't crunched to death hehehe
also can you like convince everyone at maxis and EA to make the next sims title have the awesome ai you worked on and the open world/adventure stuff from the sims 3 real quick?
@@rezination How do you feel about TS4 compared to the other three? I know everyone has their preferred preference, so I'm just curious 😊
"Little computer people" - I see, and appreciate, what you did there.
(For those unaware - Little Computer People was the name of a 1985 doll house style life sim for various 8 bit microcomputers such as the c64. A cute reference to what is probably the earliest example of The Sims' genre)
My, the doll house part. I remember when the game came out and my brothers and friends were raging fanboys for this game and I could never get them to admit it was at its heart a doll house game. Good times.
One of the early names considered for the original Sims was Sim Dollhouse. ;)
@@rezination I love that they changed it and made it gender-neutral. Also really interesting that so many boys loved a game they'd never have touched if it was called Doll- anything and sold in a pink box. Says something about how strongly gender norms influence our society, doesn't it.
@@safe-keeper1042 Yeah I mean playing with dolls is not a gendered thing but because of toy sells it has been made like that. I mean both girls and boys play with their “true” kind of dolls, you can’t tell me that GI Joe and Barbie are two different things, its the same lol
@@Pollicina_db my max steel was married to my cousin's barbie
@@Pollicina_db would NEVER play with dolls...
I collect action figures I display in cool dynamic situations with other action figures and imagine the way they're intera- oh my god I'm playing with dolls. What are my Pokémon plushies gonna think?!
I remember seeing a blog that went into the full detail of how systems like The Sims worked.
The whole "objects send out requests, NPCs just wait for an object to tell them it's free" approach; it's really interesting.
But the URL lost ownership, and the blog was never archived that I can find. Which is a shame.
There's a few GDC talks about how it all works too and how easily it can be broken
Remember when everyone used to say "if you put it on the internet, it'll exist forever"? Yea, we were sadly misinformed about that one...
The funny thing with the way it's coded, with the understanding of it (made mods for Sims 3), you could make a TV that fills the hunger meter (was just a fun thing I did to understand how the meters worked)
Yep, you can have it do whatever you want! You can also have false ads, so the Sim will think it solves for something it doesn't actually do it. For example, on The Sims Medieval, the monarch had a social that would order the servant to make food. This didn't solve for hunger, but it advertised that it did.
@@rezinationLOL that's kinda unintentionally hilarious
_dying of hunger_
_sees a servant_
"ohhh, great, FINALLY some good fucking food!!!"
_orders food 15 times_
_dies_
@@rezination It makes the servant make and bring you food though, so the monarch can then go "Oh! Food!" and eat it once they see it. In my experience, though, my monarchs usually don't order and just make the basic food that doesn't require any ingredients.
@@anyfroot1508 Yep, that was the idea. It lets us sort-of chain interactions across Sims.
@@rezination I remember reading up on sims wikia that two buildings with same motives score (as seen in shop) can be different (in this case it was due to animation lengths).
Is it fair to assume that the numbers in the shop are the signal strength used for an AI (and not necessarily anything else like real efficency)?
That would explain why (The Sims 2) all fridges have hunger score of 10 (hungry sims don't prefer expensive fridges when they are hungry), and grill have hungry score of 1 (even if both can create food about as well).
I've been considering optimising the house for the AI of the Sims and not the player-gameplay - with things like placing chess tables for sims to autonomously learn skills (and not placing the TV) and it has been an interesting experience so far :P
I wonder if I'm safe assuming that if I remove bed and replace it with a sofa with the enegy score of 1 or 2, and keep the coffee machine with the score 3, will the sims become coffeholics?
The Sims in sims2 would often sleep in the double-bed of their parents (as they had a higher energy score) or ignore the extra toilet in the corner (occupancy didn't affected motives - only proximity). The personality affecting AI in picking their motive-boosting objects explains why objects affecting fun have the biggest variety of scored (gym objects being ~3, painting and chess having ~6 and so on), but sim traits heavily affecting their choices (especially the fact that they pick random top object and not necesserily the best one - and sims picking "fun" objects even when their needs are full.
I'll have to experiment by having two mirrored version of a house, with male & female sims, one having only expensive stuff and one having only cheap stuff (with locked gender doors) and compare the two.
The fact that TS3 and TS4 actually use hidden motives to do their bidding, it makes me wonder how hard would be modding in a custom ones to act on the player's behalf.
In all my years playing 3, I never knew the traits themselves acted as needs.
Not all of them, but they certainly can. :) Traits can add/remove any motives, or give multipliers for existing motives (so gluttons have a multiplier to hunger desire, for instance).
@rezination: just read a ton of your comments, I loved the sims4 (with mods to make traits more valued than emotions, hope you don't mind).
How can you get a job like yours? I've been a frontend dev for years but love AI and want to switch career :)
Yeah I never noticed 😂
I noticed it a while back. I had a shy Sim and her social bar never really went down despite never getting social interactions. Same thing with loner sims. And with the “fun” need, traits affect what a Sim sees as fun. Like gardening isn’t fun to sims that hate the outdoors. Or sims who can’t stand art would not want to paint. Pretty cool
@@rezinationDoes anything else work as invisible motives?
I like what's said about how ambiguity in a game leaves room for the player to let their imagination fill in the blanks. One place I see this in is the older Pokemon games, very specifically the ones in a pixelated style. During battles, any attack a pokemon does is very simple on screen: the game says "This pokemon used this move", and then it plays an extremely simple animation with extra effects to get the general idea of what the move was across to the player, and then you see how it effected the pokemon. You could look at this as underwhelming, but I actually really appreciate the lack of flare there because as a kid, it always resulted in me imagining in my head a much more complicated fight. It's almost like how when you read a book and hear something like "Dory fumbled-ly kicked off the wall and landed above the monster", its not showing you a specific explicit scene like an animation might show, but instead offers an interesting idea that prompts your imagination to think up something unique to your head and lets everyone share their different interpretations and thoughts.
The Sims for me will never exceed the feeling of going forward in time and seeing my descendants in a Sims 3 DLC. Peak
Into The Future was so good
I used to love the Sims 1 & 2. Incredible soundtracks when you’re building or buying things in game. The Sims 4 has a very cool adaptive soundtrack that introduces or removes music stems while you do different things. I hope the Sims 5 does something fun with the soundtrack but I’m also very likely to skip it if it’s full of microtransactions
I have some bad news for you: All of the Sims games are full of microtransactions.
Just pirate, chief. We all do it.
I hope Sims 5 comes with all the extension packs from the prior games, rather than having day 1 DLC.
I also hope corruption in politics will cease.
Neither will happen.
I remember this piano in building mode of TS1 used to make me feel so sad and emotional after a while, I had to take breaks from build mode because of this. And it was not even PMS because I was really young
@@CrypticGamine LOL that last bit, I absolutely love the build music from TS1
Great video! The systems behind the Sims and other simulation-heavy games are truly fascinating.
As an aside, it seems the current tech hype cycle completely poisoned the word “ai”. Makes it hard to have conversations about the “classic” video game ai.
In fairness, isn't that kind of our fault? We borrowed the 'AI' label because it sounded cool, and slapped it on a bunch of systems that really had no business being called 'artificial intelligence' in the first place.
@@JackFoz454 Well, the name was given by people presenting the technologies. In previous hype cycles, they called roughly the same thing "algorithms" and "neural networks" and we were using these names (even when they weren't exactly reflective of the tech being talked about).
When all the media and the companies making the thing are calling it "ai", it's hard to call it something else and be understood.
(Same with the game ai. There's probably a better term to describe it, but we're stuck calling it that)
I don't think it's even wrong to call either AI. Both act in what appears to be an intelligent manner but in reality are just the results of a set of computations. The difference is largely in how we come up with those computations.
Before neural networks, we used linear models and decision trees. Those models could be "learned" algorithmically from some data, but they could also just be hand-written. That's what this game AI is: a hand-written set of linear models and decision trees that predicts happiness based on situation (needs, location) and action choices, where the optimal set of choices is chosen by a multiobjective optimizer under a set of constraints (which actions are allowed given the situation).
It is artificial intelligence in the literal sense of the word: it's appears to act intelligently, despite only being a mathematical computation and not a "true" intelligence (whatever that is).
Machine learning is just another word for statistical modelling. Neural networks are just an extension of linear models (along with tremendous computing power and a laundry list of new algorithms for making it possible to fit these non-linear models in reasonable time). Today's ChatGPT is just a much more advanced (read: larger) version of ELIZA from the 1960s. Today's AI is just bigger and more expressive, largely due to the immense amount of data and computing power that we have today compared to what we once had.
I realize I'm oversimplifying the strides we have made in algorithms and strategies that make it possible to build and utilize these newer, bigger models, but at the end of the day, they are still just equations scoring options and choosing the best - it's an evolution, not a revolution.
If anything, the biggest revolution is that the models have become so large that we can't make them by hand, instead having to "learn" them through finding a best-fit to a set of examples ("machine learning"). These new, more complicated and expressive models are also black boxes - neither did we choose the weights, we also don't understand what they represent, nor can we readily predict what they would roughly evaluate to without fully evaluating them. In fact, the graph of inputs to outputs is complex and interconnected that it looks a lot like an encryption algorithm or pseudorandom number generator!
And yet, self-driving / autopilot, recommender systems, generative AIs of all kinds, speech recognition / natural language processing, and so many other forms of AI are still AI in the general sense: they act as if they have some sort of intelligence, despite being the result of a complex calculation. Autopilot choosing when to press the brakes, or UA-cam choosing what video to recommend next, are not fundamentally different from your Sim choosing what action to take to increase its happiness: it's just a difference of scale.
In the other examples at the end, you forgot the most important factor that XCOM's AI judges: optimal player suffering.
Seriously though, really value these videos as a programmer myself. The "advertisement" idea was super eye-opening, because I would also be stuck trying to make the characters "know" everything they need to do and what's around them, and that's a better system on just about every level.
That's interesting! I also program a bit, and I was left slightly unimpressed/confused by the part that started, 'You might assume a sim knows that toilets will fill their bladder meter, etc... but no!' Because the video went on to describe a system where they totally DO know that. The information originates with the individual objects, sure, but only so they can advertise it to the sims, so they'll know that toilets fill their bladder meter.
I enjoyed the video, and the underlying info was very interesting. It was just this framing (which I imagine was intended to keep the script interesting) which didn't land for me.
@@JackFoz454 the point is that the code running a sim only knows what's advertised to it in the sense that it grabs a list of stuff. The stuff is (simplified) a list of key-value pairs where the key is a need and the value is its satisfaction rate. Then the sim amplifies specific values based on what it currently needs and picks one and goes to do it. That code doesnt know what object its picking, only what its value represents.
Basically there's an abstraction level between the sims code and the objects code in order to make the code more scalable, i.e. if you want to add another object you just specify its need and its value and it works. Imo there was no reason to point this out because its simple and obvious if youve ever done this kind of stuff, and it leads to people being confused.
The advertisement idea is a pattern you constantly use without realizing it. Think of how dhcp works, the client sends a broadcast discover message, then servers give it an offer, then the client chooses (sends an address request and then the server acknowledges it). The first two (three) steps are the same as the sims example. Think of how a multiplayer game server might work. To an extent you can apply this to how you handle collisions etc. You could even draw parallels to a file visitor design pattern if you've ever studied stuff Like that.
Its pretty cool how you can apply the same trick, just give a different mask each time, and theres a bunch of programming patterns like this
You: 99% Hit Chance
Actual hit chance: 50/50
Enemy: 5% Hit Chance
Actual hit chance: 50/50
I know, I KNOW, the values are weighted on the back end, because I've witnessed 5% enemy attacks hit 5 times in a row multiple times, which would be like winning (losing?) The lottery multiple times, and I've missed 99% shots 3 times in a row multiple times, which is a 1/10,000 event. XCOM would probably be more mainstream if it was actually fair. Players don't like feeling cheated.
@@chrismanuel9768 Believe it or not, it's actually the opposite. They secretly weigh things in your favour to make the outcomes 'feel' more fair. I forget where I learned about this (sorry) but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find if you're interested.
Name something that you took away from this video:
“People aren’t ants.”
A more important bit of wisdom than it seems. A lot of folk out there truly apply standards of hive- and ant morality to people and dismiss the greater nuance of emergent cooperation born from hyper egoism.
Except if you are terminally online, then we act like a hive mind.
Love this kinda stuff, just shows how video games are both art and engineering at the same time.
The way Mark says urinal is the oddest, most British way of saying urinal I've ever heard. 😂
Don’t forget the way British people say “advertisement”. 😅
Listen to Taliesin say 'controversy'
It's indeed how most Britons say it, especially in the older generations less influenced by Americans
I mean, the English invented English, so it's generally spoken correctly by the English.
@@Craig-lk1sp Eh, "correctly" doesn't really exist with any language. Different places and their accents vary at the same rate. American English preserved the "r" after vowels and a lot of vowel elements British English changed out of etc. "Urinal" was coined well after the American/British split so no version is more "correct" than the other
This just reminded me of playing The Sims 2 on a Ps2 with my brother on 2-player mode and whenever one of our characters went to sleep, the other had to go on auto while we fast fowarded until the other woke up so we both could play as long as possible. We mostly hated the AI, specially for going for social interactions with characters we didn't care about(we usually only picked one girl to date and only talked to her lol) when we mostly just liked grinding stats for promotions at our jobs.
Finally some Sims 3 appreciation. If that game wasn't such a technical mess (especially when you throw in all the expansions, some of which are clearly not designed to mesh) it would remain the unchallenged peak of the franchise.
Genius? You could've fooled me. They can't even climb out of a pool without a ladder.
Maybe they know how to but just got weak arms lol
Or wash their dishes in the bathroom, even when the kitchen is closer😂
😂Maybe they're too smart and realizing they're meaninglessness they keep killing them selves
That can be really hard you know, especially if you cant stand in the pool
fun times ❤
Never really got into SIMS but you explaining it makes it 100% more interesting.
My favourite sim game was probably castaway. There was something about that survival experience that felt really engaging long before the many early access survival games you see today. I kinda wish a similar game was made today, with less of a focus on playing 1 person surviving and more about keeping a group alive and happy.
I just did a bunch of sims research for a documentary and read a lot of interesting things (especially the items broadcasting their needs), I'm so glad you made a whole video about this stuff
i'd love to hear more about this documentary, will it be on youtube?
@@issy483 it's already on my channel maybe 2 or 3 videos ago
I never noticed how smart the AI was, like how they make a grilled cheese at 2 in the morning or walk across the street to talk everyone or die in all swimmable water known to man.
Oooooh look at me, Mr.Hasnt had a 2am grilled cheese
@@dizzynarutofan100 What a stupid idea. Who wants a grilled cheese at two in the morning?
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter college students
@@maxlimit9129 College students who have apparently never watched SpongeBob.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter Everyone. That's the most delicious time of day for grilled cheese.
One of my favorite gaming stories is from the original Sims. My girlfriend at the time was playing it, and she downloaded all sorts of custom skins. She also, like many, meticulously murdered so, so many of her Sims' neighbors and specifically didn't mourn their graves to create ghosts. So this household contained Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), Shirley Manson (Garbage), and The Crow. Trent and Shirley were in a relationship, but Trent would flirt with The Crow once in a while. Shirley hated this, and would beat The Crow up. He would retreat to his castle-dungeon-themed second story room and go out on the balcony and just start crying, overlooking the random available ghosts haunting the 100+ person graveyard. So he's crying to Charles Manson and some of The Spive Girls, and the weirdest thing would happen.
His social meter would *go up*.
I have no idea what mechanically was allowing that to happen, for it to be The Crow of all people just made it so poetically perfect. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. What a fantastic game.
My favorite part of the genius AI is when sims wash the dishes in the bathroom sink.. even if it's on another floor, and there's a dishwasher available
feel like Sims 2 fans are going to give you some heat for that opening statement
Was just about to write this.
It’s okay, we can respect their wrong opinions
@@randomguy6679 Lmao noo
i think as long as we can agree sims 4 is the worst, all other picks for best game can be valid
I love having the sims 3 up and running by itself while I work. I look over to see where they end up with bits of inputs here and there. The oddest thing that happened was one sim quit their part-time job while on a trip to Egypt. I dont know how or why so I'm still confused there.
Lol “I’m staying here now”
I'd love to see a follow up video to this which explores why the AI in Sims 4 is SO BAD in comparison - with Sims 3 it was possible to watch a sim for a bit and get a sense of their traits whereas in 4 every sim feels a lot more generic.
I do know that sims in sims 4 like really hate the dollhouse
Like super hate it. No matter what.
i had to fix it so many times
It's funny, I've heard the same thing said about The Sims 3 in comparison to the Sims 2. And the Sims 2 in comparison to the Sims 1. I've also heard the opposite, where The Sims 4 was so much better. It's all about perception and expectation. Say a Sim has two choices: X and Y. You'll get a significant number of people who think they should choose X and another group who thinks they should choose Y. The designers do their best to balance the game as best they can, but it's impossible to please everyone.
@@rezination Also sims 4 relies more on emotion. Like that was the driving force behind the game.
Hence why every angry sim ends up inevitably, stomping the poor dollhouse to bits.
Sims 3 is more trait based, like Sims 2 and 1
@@elvingearmasterirma7241 Yep, emotions were one of the big things in The Sims 4, mostly managed through buffs as I described above. Specific behaviors were tuned by designers, so apparently they hated the dollhouse. ;)
I also feel like I have to babysit my sims 4 sims CONSTANTLY because they will just "hang" partway through an action without finishing it as their bars tick down. I've lost multiple children to child services because no adult would get the toddler in the high chair + give them food + have the toddler start consuming it on time
This is a great example of the power of data-driven programming. Even the production rules still act as data, it's just more structured than "quirkiness = 10". As you said, making these things data allows for emergent behaviors and extensibility. More programmers, especially game programmers, need to familiarize themselves with this paradigm.
This is exactly correct. :) And I totally agree.
This was really interesting, the whole system of having the different needs of a Sim be weighted differently, and then later adding in traits to further modify a Sim's needs hierarchy, is so smart. I also love that objects broadcast themselves, rather than a Sim simply looking for X-Object to fulfill X-Need. That makes SO much sense (and makes it way easier for them to make tons of new items for expansions lol).
Speaking of Expansions, if they, say, add in a new trait in an expansion, would they then have to go back and modify old items and let some of those older items be able to advertise themselves as fulfilling X-points for Y-New-Trait, or would they just have only the items/activities in the new expansion fulfill those needs?
They do modify older code pretty much all the time with updates and expansions! One example is how vampires can be scared away by a dog when trying to invade your house at night - even though dogs were added to the game much later.
If you haven't seen Tynan Sylvester's 2017 GDC talk, "RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods" you might really enjoy it. He refers to the "filling in" that players do (esp. wrt causal information) as apophenia, and as in The Sims, it was a core part of RimWorld's design.
Correct, though the AI is very different (I worked on RimWorld briefly). It's a decision tree (not to be confused with behavior trees). I spoke to him about going with a more utility approach and his counter was that your colonists are pawns; they need to be completely deterministic because they are playing pieces in your game, which has real win/lose consequences as opposed to The Sims, which does not. I disagreed because you can still do that with utility AND get all the nuance you get with The Sims. The project I'm working on right now does exactly that. (Just to be clear, this is not a dig at all on Tynan or his decision. He's awesome and a brilliant designer, I just disagree with his take here.)
This is the most well put-together video essay on a certain topic. You linking the resources and the little edits in the video too bring the value of the video really high
when i tried out the sims back in the day, i somehow binged it for 8h straight and after that i had one of the most horrible stress dreams: i was an employee somewhere and people delivered empty status bars to my desk. i had to stare at them real hard to make them fill up again, which was very straining, because when i stopped concentrating for a second, they emptied out again. and there were so SO many of those bars and people dumped more and more of them onto my desk, completely ignorant of the fact that i couldnt keep up...
i never played the sims ever again after that xD
Have 40h+ in last two weeks in the Sims 3 and this video drops, what a coincidence. Been playing this series on and off since around 2004. 3rd hands down the best, wish 5th will have open world as well
Only time will tell. This franchise deserves an actual evolution from the Sims 3
Really disliked sims 4 for not being open world. Immediately takes you out of the immersion.
Been playing on and off since 2007, Kinda sad the next one will a mobile game filled with microtransanctions 😭
I only wish you had spent a bit of time talking about the HUGE leaps made from sims 1 to sims 2, but ig it's really 1/2 to 3 that had the biggest jump re personality ai
and then the sims 4 happened.
(would LOVE if you did a follow up re how the ai falls apart in sims 4)
Oh yea. The genius AI that cancels my actions, gets stuck, goes through objects, keepings randomly getting up and sitting down... love it.
Freezing my sim 10 hours in game
Don't forget washing the dishes in the wrong sink, going to the farthest toilet possible, randomly stopping cooking in the middle of it, and refusing to feed starving children. Oh ya and of course doing random pushups at the worst possible times.
the classic sims music is just... so soothing for the soul
I LOVE THE SIMS, FINALLY AN EPISODE FROM GMTK!
Your explanation was so cool and interesting! It made me love the Sims 3 even more (and it's still my favorite of the franchise), and it really provided context for the silly behavior sims can have.
My girlfriend does exactly as they intended. She plays for hours creating and making these elaborate stories.
It truly is impressive the level of simulation achieved and really makes the "Are WE a simulation?" All the more interesting.
meanwhile i give my guy a million quid and make him trap the entire city in a small room
@@Archman155😂
This is a great video! The best simulation games are the ones that allow the player to create their own elaborate stores / head cannon. Rimworld does this perfectly.
Agreed. This is also why Dwarf Fortress has a long standing fandom. Despite the tremendous complexity of the simulation, the AI is rather rudimentary, with much of the behavior being emergent from the chaotic interaction of all the systems in the simulation. The resulting behaviors can be completely bonkers, leading to some unexpected hilariously moments that seem to happen without cause, giving the player an opportunity to explain why such a situation occurred. This often leads to intentionally trying to set up potentially unstable situations just to see what will happen, furthering the level of memorably unexpected outcomes and the stories surrounding them.
This was such a fun video to watch, I could hear you talk about these things for hours!
This video was really cool and informative! I’d love it if you did one explaining the action queue system, especially why the hell do the Sims in 4 get to just decide to drop all their actions sometimes. I don’t recall them ever doing that in previous games. Before, if an action was on the queue, they would only not do it if it was literally impossible for them, now it seems they can wipe the queue for no apparent reason.
This was so interesting! I've loved the sims for years and never knew that's how their motivations worked, thanks for making this video!!
I absolutely love all your vids and their what got me into game dev!
Thank for such interesting video, always wondered how this all simulation was working.
This was a fantastic overview, ended up getting some ideas on how to implement some of this into a wee turn based strategy game I've been working on
so according to the sims 3, sitting at the sofa to watch tv is at the very top of maslow's hierarchy of needs
Feels correct.
It's funny because some of my sims are based on characters I've written, and for the most part the things they do autonomously are oddly in-character for them, even with only the basic 3 personality traits. The last part about ambiguity really shed a light on how I've been filling in the gaps and I have to say, very well-put sir
This video was really interesting. Great to see another gmtk vid.
About the Decision Making 101 section, the devs of Mark of the Ninja did some similar work on noise sources and explained it very well. It's a common pattern in game to build relationship in reverse like described here so it's good to see how and why by different professionals
That was super interesting, as always! I noticed you talked a lot about code, a video where you talk about how Developing changed your approach to making GMTK videos would be fascinating! ❤
This is honestly the best video I've seen for a long time. I am developing a management simulation game, and we were struggling with making the AI feel realistic and complex, without have a pile of convoluted rule sets. All I can say is, we are gonna lean fully into this utility AI stuff. Not only will it make sre NPCs cact more believable, but its actually going to cut down development time a whole lot. Thank you sir!
I did not expect that deep of an analysis and I am still amazed of how great the Sims AI works. Thanks for the amazing video.
The annoying thing that happens though is that the sims are prone to take naps and have snacks all the time. Rather than waiting for when the Energy bar is lower and have a proper night's sleep, they'll have random naps or go to sleep in the middle of the afternoon. I've always found the AI very frustrating so I never have autonomy on; I have to do a lot more work interrupting what the AI is telling my sims to do.
I can’t play the sims for one simple reason: the sims will always wash their dishes in the bathroom, despite the sink being two feet away. I put the bathroom on another floor and they still made the journey there. Broken AI, not funny stories.
quite realistic, tbh
Could that be because there is not enough other things to fill up other bars?
If eating or sleeping are the only available bonuses they are most likely going to fall back to that more often, very much like a real human with nothing to do :)
@@davidmartensson273 Can confirm: boredom eating and falling asleep on the couch when bored are very realistic human behaviors.
The restaurant discouraging frugal sims is hysterical😂
This was a fantastic episode. Somehow very different from your typical videos yet very on brand.
it seems there's a precursor version of the "Different personality traits unlock different unique interactions" thing in even the earlier games--for example, in Sims 2, only a Sim with high Playfulness would autonomously juggle bottles from the fridge or play "pirate" in the bathtub. It's interesting to trace things back through the series that way.
Awesome, thanks for the summary of the AI behind the sims! If possible, I think it'd be really cool if you could show us if there are other games that have played off this formula or tweaked it, would be super cool to see what impacts this kind of design has had on the game industry :).
I can see that Hollow Knight has a very in-depth AI. It can tell exactly when I'm finally starting to feel like I'm doing good, then crushes me with an evil boss or weirdly specific death. Hasn't failed once! :)
If possible, I think a video about how Dwarf Fortress works could be incredibly interesting.
I'm actually building a somewhat similar game, and I came to the same conclusion to have the items be the driving factor as being the best way to do this as well(after encountering difficulties primarily in how manageable the system was to design when it was character centric). Realizing this also allowed me to more easily add more items in my game, and have them be instantly useable by players(as mentioned about The Sims packs and I can understand why/how they are so easily able to drop a couple dozen items in a month).
Many people talking about the silly things that Sims sometimes do in the game is a testament to how unnoticeably fantastic the AI is for MOST of the time. It's so good that people think it's funny when something happens slightly strange from a human perspective. For the Sims this is a triumph that I don't believe any other game can boast as other games' AI are comparatively so non-human that nobody would point out something so trivial.
Too bad I didn't have this video as a blueprint before I started. 😆
so informative! and well paced/sourced too. great job! thank you for sharing :)
I love deep dives into complicated subjects like AI! If you'd want to dive deeper into how the XCOM AI thinks for example, I'd be all for that. The little clip at the end has already got me plenty excited!
"And, let's be honest - the best one, which is the Sims 3." Them's fightin' words, my friend
He’s out of line, but he’s right
This is so great! Please do more "How the AI works in Such and Such A Game's Characters" videos... 😊
Thank you for this, I've always been curious about the ai behind the Sims, this was fascinating!
I love GMT
I love Sims
my life is complete with this video
Until the next one.
Interesting. Rimworld has a very similar set of meters controlling its pawns. Food, rest, recreation, etc. And they have traits. I guess I see where Tynan's inspiration came from. It's quite an elegant system
RimWorld (which I also briefly worked on) is VERY different under the covers. The AI uses something called a decision tree (not to be confused with behavior trees). It's completely deterministic for anything except the lowest-level actions.
Motive level-of-detail is an especially neat little trick
I’ve always been curious of the game series operated. Been playing The Sims since 1. I hope you do more on The Sims. :)
The worse thing ever is food/energy depletion which I run into a lot with pregnancy in Sims 2. And while preggers and post-preggers it completely makes sense the body is essentially thrown out of wack but since you only get a few days with a very needy baby sim who can’t take care of themselves getting sims out of this loop is sometimes frustrating. Getting them to eat a little before they pass out and get enough sleep to get up and eat a little food is frustrating.
There's a reason family and friends often help out a family with a newborn child by providing cooked meals and some babysitting. A mother taking care of a particularly difficult newborn all on her own will often find she is barely able to sleep or eat to the point where she suffers considerable personal harm neglecting her own needs to take care of her child.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in The Sims is how one's character is entirely independent from day one. There are no existing friends or family to help with social needs or providing money or other care when things get tough. You don't start with a job or a nest egg. It's as if you are exiled and find yourself a refugee in a new land. This is why almost all survival games, colony builders, or other life sims start you off with some kind of "optimism" mood bonus. Since your life situation will be absolutely terrible for the first while, your mood would quickly tank if compared against any kind of normal metric of acceptable living conditions. So to get past that initial hell without losing your mind, you need a rather large amount of hope and optimism to make up for it.
The AI logic really sounds like fuzzy logic in action.
Incredible episode and resources. I feel like this might come in handy in a future game
This was a really interesting look at the Sims - a game which I had lost interest in until just recently. I'm so glad I decided to give your channel a chance and I'm looking forward to looking through your content for more videos like this one. :) Thank you for an informative and interesting dive into AI!
18:53 this part in particular was very interesting because it nails exactly what makes the Sims 4 so frustrating at the moment. I haven't played in a month, but last time I did Sims would always start random fights even with their lovers and close ones, would wish to break up out of the blue, would get intruding and annoying fears popping up all of the time... And NPCs now have a set sexuality too
Fears thing u can turn off and sexuality makes sense
I admittedly haven't played any of the Sims games, but I _have_ watched people play them on UA-cam, and I genuinely never thought about how their AI worked. It just felt so normal for them to do things on their own that I never questioned it.
The testers story and katy part was so adorable!!!!
great video as always. I remember being obsessed with the sims as a kid.
Sims 4 AI left the chat
This explains what I'd already guessed, the occults like aliens and vampires will (mostly) leave your Sim alone entirely if you never interact with them. I'd guess that talking to them once or researching vampires/sending out the single on the satellite gives your Sim a hidden buff letting the AI know you're interested in either an abduction or a break-in (if the vampire, like Vlad for example, can do that.) I assume also that being an A student (perhaps also parenting) gives a buff/trait that encourages a child or teen Sim to do their homework without player input, which is cool because it inspires the interpretation of habits or "learning" over time what the player wants akin to how the game notices who your Sim is romancing. I'd be amused to know if the hidden fruitcake trait is only rolled after they eat it for the first time, so they'd never find out whether they like it or not until they actually try the dish. It doesn't really matter when it happens but it makes me wonder if cooking skill and the quality of the fruitcake has any impact on more Sims liking it (otherwise it has whatever weight they assigned to the odds.)
Crazy interesting, just like all your videos. Thanks for the wonderful work!
Awesome video!! Good job doing it!!
Thanks for making it!! It's really helpful :D