Interesting idea to forego the ambient & environmental noise masking mechanic. I remember that being one of the most important layers of stealth in Chaos Theory and Double Agent. There was a visual slider with a min / max threshold, and different noises would fill it to varying degrees. There was also a slider for the amount of noise that Sam himself was making, and as long as Sam’s noise didn’t eclipse the environmental threshold, enemies couldn’t hear him. You could run around in loud areas audibly undetected. Maybe it was cut for balancing reasons, but imo it was just as dynamic and impressive as the visibility mechanic, cool stuff that I hope they bring back with the SC Remake.
I would've liked to hear more reasoning for not having it be a game-wide thing, though I'm glad he confirmed the special cases I could've sworn I noticed (like he mentions at 28:10)... anyhow, my guess is it was mainly for de-cluttering HUD (15:08) which in turn meant more subtle cases of masking would have to go, as it'd lead to the player thinking detection was inconsistent.
wow... superb talk... I've played about 40 hours on Splinter Cell: Conviction and over 250 hours on Splinter Cell: Blacklist.. as well as being a UDK and UE4 game developer. The AI in Splinter Cell series is superb... to be fair though, I haven't played the latest Assasssin's Creed and Far Cry installments (or Sleeping Dogs)... but IMHO it's by far the best and most fun I've ever played. I visited this talk to glean ideas for my own indie game which also has stealth elements :)
What's your opinion now? Given that it has been 2 years. PS I am not a game developer but a full stack web developer who just loves the idea of AI. Would need to study math when my career becomes stable.
11:12, that's a really good idea. Letting the object inform the AI. I was thinking the opposite, letting the AI remember if doors were open or not, but that would be crazy, and the AI would forget, like real people would. :P
I really love how the feedback was: "AI is reacting too slowly, they look stupid" and "AI is way too fast to react". This is essentially what I get for all stealth games worked on. Really hard to make improvements with that kind of feedback :)
The perception would be amazing if it didn't have it's issues. The peripheral vision is insane, greater than even real life and that is for just normal soldiers! For Riot Soldiers it's like their peripheral was turned to 15 out of 10. The amount of times I got caught sneaking up on someone (by that someone) even though I came from behind at an angle is stupidly high. There was a few times where I was also spotted by people when their own head did a 180 turn before their body! The AI can be super sporadic that it's annoying.
Edit: There are also times (most notable in the Charlie Embassy missions) where the AI randomly trigger a combat alert. Every time they happened I was like, wtf?!
Beautiful. So many layers of complexity goes into a competent AI system. I think if a world consuming AI is ever developed it will come from a stealth game. And it will be worth it to get to play that perfect game.
A guy mentioned Skyrim, which has whole additional challenges because the world is (a little too) persistent. Once you kill a guy, the dead body lays there for in-game days (or maybe forever, I forget), but human guards simply cannot remain on "full alert" for days on end. Clearly they revert to normal too quickly in Skyrim, but in an open-ended (not level-based) game, they have to go back to normal eventually. I rarely see a "scared for their lives" state in which guards are willing to surrender or run off, but I have seen it done effectively in a face-to-face RPG and it created really memorable gameplay. Suddenly becoming aware of the amount of pain, horror, and destruction that your character has caused can stick with you.
I like the idea of dominating the AI so hard that they surrender. Cool concept. Then you're left with the choice of slaying them as they run or let them go and risk them bringing backup.
one thing Im still teying to understand is if the ai is in combat and has lsot sight of the player while another ai can still see him how does this ensure that the ai does not come out of combat loop? also cases like taking cover where the ai does not have a visual of the player
What I really want to know if they at some point they started to play around with awareness and perception until they went "this is as realistic Splinter Cell will get, it will take most player 3 hours to beat one level", and if they did, why did that difficulty didn't make it to the final game, even if as just an extra, unrewarded thing for the crazies, like EE in Metal Gear 3.
This was very interesting. So many details have been thought of regarding AI behaviour and perception. Some things sadly went missing that were already there in previous installations, like enviromental sound effects masking the sound of the player as it was in SC:CT already. I just hope for one thing in the future. New SC games, or games of that sort in general, should have the AI be a mix of SC:PT, SC:CT and SC:BL. Take the best of all. Plus an "authentic" difficulty setting that gets rid of most of all the little "helper-mechanisms" that make the games more "enjoyable"... Leave that for the standard and hard difficulties...
I rubbed Blacklist to black holes, some of the developer's works is the of the best in the game, like contextual animations and Ai beahviour. But as a fan of the series i find it funny, that the developer states about so-called AI features, when at the same time all of that stuff was presented in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which has been released in march 2005. Chaos Theory AI provided even more. NPC's could shoot in the dark if you were too noisy, they could notice if electronic panel or computer were hacked.
@@DreadNawght, I dont think it is that dumb. Moreover, what I'd really like to see is NPC group behavior when youre throwing smoke towards some safe place in the middle of combat, so they would start pour horizontal lead rain on the smoke cloud, and one of them could even throw a frag there, just to ensure you wont reach that safe place. That would be a pure nightmare on Perfectionist difficulty when it only takes one or two hits to kill Sam Fisher.
@@mikethechemis Try reading books about philosophy, religion, or even the newspaper. It will help you avoid speaking random nonsense that nobody cares about.
Wildlands is more than likely made by a different team, I'm pretty sure the scale of the map is at least 80% of the games itself and it probably really doesnt want stealth to be such a mained playstyle anyway
Interesting idea to forego the ambient & environmental noise masking mechanic. I remember that being one of the most important layers of stealth in Chaos Theory and Double Agent.
There was a visual slider with a min / max threshold, and different noises would fill it to varying degrees. There was also a slider for the amount of noise that Sam himself was making, and as long as Sam’s noise didn’t eclipse the environmental threshold, enemies couldn’t hear him. You could run around in loud areas audibly undetected.
Maybe it was cut for balancing reasons, but imo it was just as dynamic and impressive as the visibility mechanic, cool stuff that I hope they bring back with the SC Remake.
I would've liked to hear more reasoning for not having it be a game-wide thing, though I'm glad he confirmed the special cases I could've sworn I noticed (like he mentions at 28:10)... anyhow, my guess is it was mainly for de-cluttering HUD (15:08) which in turn meant more subtle cases of masking would have to go, as it'd lead to the player thinking detection was inconsistent.
wow... superb talk... I've played about 40 hours on Splinter Cell: Conviction and over 250 hours on Splinter Cell: Blacklist.. as well as being a UDK and UE4 game developer. The AI in Splinter Cell series is superb... to be fair though, I haven't played the latest Assasssin's Creed and Far Cry installments (or Sleeping Dogs)... but IMHO it's by far the best and most fun I've ever played. I visited this talk to glean ideas for my own indie game which also has stealth elements :)
What's your opinion now? Given that it has been 2 years. PS I am not a game developer but a full stack web developer who just loves the idea of AI. Would need to study math when my career becomes stable.
11:12, that's a really good idea. Letting the object inform the AI.
I was thinking the opposite, letting the AI remember if doors were open or not, but that would be crazy, and the AI would forget, like real people would. :P
I really love how the feedback was: "AI is reacting too slowly, they look stupid" and "AI is way too fast to react". This is essentially what I get for all stealth games worked on. Really hard to make improvements with that kind of feedback :)
The perception would be amazing if it didn't have it's issues. The peripheral vision is insane, greater than even real life and that is for just normal soldiers! For Riot Soldiers it's like their peripheral was turned to 15 out of 10.
The amount of times I got caught sneaking up on someone (by that someone) even though I came from behind at an angle is stupidly high.
There was a few times where I was also spotted by people when their own head did a 180 turn before their body! The AI can be super sporadic that it's annoying.
Edit: There are also times (most notable in the Charlie Embassy missions) where the AI randomly trigger a combat alert. Every time they happened I was like, wtf?!
bring me on for QA I can be very specific lol
Beautiful. So many layers of complexity goes into a competent AI system. I think if a world consuming AI is ever developed it will come from a stealth game. And it will be worth it to get to play that perfect game.
U've done a wonderful game btw, though it lacks grabbing the ledges.
You can feel the put into this game from this talk alone. Well and playing the game of course.
Great talk! The speaker was amazing!
5:30 keyboard label: TORILLA TAVATAAN!
A guy mentioned Skyrim, which has whole additional challenges because the world is (a little too) persistent. Once you kill a guy, the dead body lays there for in-game days (or maybe forever, I forget), but human guards simply cannot remain on "full alert" for days on end. Clearly they revert to normal too quickly in Skyrim, but in an open-ended (not level-based) game, they have to go back to normal eventually. I rarely see a "scared for their lives" state in which guards are willing to surrender or run off, but I have seen it done effectively in a face-to-face RPG and it created really memorable gameplay. Suddenly becoming aware of the amount of pain, horror, and destruction that your character has caused can stick with you.
I like the idea of dominating the AI so hard that they surrender. Cool concept. Then you're left with the choice of slaying them as they run or let them go and risk them bringing backup.
Ryan Bennett
Thats Overlord in a nutshell, it's a great game.
Great video! Great explanation! This is so interesting! Thank you so much!
The best StealthAI ever
one thing Im still teying to understand is if the ai is in combat and has lsot sight of the player while another ai can still see him how does this ensure that the ai does not come out of combat loop? also cases like taking cover where the ai does not have a visual of the player
What I really want to know if they at some point they started to play around with awareness and perception until they went "this is as realistic Splinter Cell will get, it will take most player 3 hours to beat one level", and if they did, why did that difficulty didn't make it to the final game, even if as just an extra, unrewarded thing for the crazies, like EE in Metal Gear 3.
Blacklist is a masterpiece!
Amen to that!
The combat and search ai is better than Wildlands. 2012 xbox 360 vs 2017 xb1
This was very interesting. So many details have been thought of regarding AI behaviour and perception. Some things sadly went missing that were already there in previous installations, like enviromental sound effects masking the sound of the player as it was in SC:CT already.
I just hope for one thing in the future. New SC games, or games of that sort in general, should have the AI be a mix of SC:PT, SC:CT and SC:BL. Take the best of all.
Plus an "authentic" difficulty setting that gets rid of most of all the little "helper-mechanisms" that make the games more "enjoyable"... Leave that for the standard and hard difficulties...
I rubbed Blacklist to black holes, some of the developer's works is the of the best in the game, like contextual animations and Ai beahviour. But as a fan of the series i find it funny, that the developer states about so-called AI features, when at the same time all of that stuff was presented in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which has been released in march 2005. Chaos Theory AI provided even more. NPC's could shoot in the dark if you were too noisy, they could notice if electronic panel or computer were hacked.
NPC shooting in the dark is a bit dumb tbh, recently I dl CT again and the only time npc shot in the dark was in cargo ship gas room.
@@DreadNawght, I dont think it is that dumb. Moreover, what I'd really like to see is NPC group behavior when youre throwing smoke towards some safe place in the middle of combat, so they would start pour horizontal lead rain on the smoke cloud, and one of them could even throw a frag there, just to ensure you wont reach that safe place. That would be a pure nightmare on Perfectionist difficulty when it only takes one or two hits to kill Sam Fisher.
@@mikethechemis Try reading books about philosophy, religion, or even the newspaper. It will help you avoid speaking random nonsense that nobody cares about.
@@DreadNawght, guess I have some issues with my English. If you are talking about it, I definitely agree. Thanks for the advice and have a nice day!
I hope he got his laptop charger
How is it that this game was so in depth with the AI yet they missed the opportunity to add this level of detail with GR: Wildlands?
The combat and search ai is better than Wildlands. 2012 xbox 360 vs 2017 xb1
Wildlands is more than likely made by a different team, I'm pretty sure the scale of the map is at least 80% of the games itself and it probably really doesnt want stealth to be such a mained playstyle anyway
Toxic fans fucked over this absolutely epic game.
What is TEAS? Nvm I got it after watching it 2nd time.