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gggmork
Senior Member

Posts: 1943
Registered: 06-07

Just wondering for curiosity's sake. Considering how the darpa grand challenge (getting robot cars to drive automated) was likely.. challening (hence the name 'challenge'), maybe this would be way too hard (like making ai play doom/record an automated demo at doomgod skill).

03-28-10 22:14 #

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Phml
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There's been discussion on that in the demo forum, and as far as I understand, knowledgeable people concluded there's so many parameters in Doom it'd be too hard. I'm sure you can find the topic if you make a search about "TAS".

03-28-10 22:26 #

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kristus
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Uhm, there are bots. That is AI that is playing the game. The bots in Doom aren't very advanced however. But if you look at games like Q3 and Unreal Tournament, you can find bots that actually can move around and use strategy on the map. If you want to see them play just spec them.

Yeah, this is obviously not SP. But making SP playing bots should be even easier than making DM playing.

Question is how to balance your bot though. Since you can give it every ability that humans can't have. Like very strong rocket prediction. 100% aim. 0 time reflexes.

03-28-10 23:08 #

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printz
CRAZY DUMB ZEALOT

Posts: 6838
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Can it be set to "cheat" by knowing what all the nearby monsters are going to do, by predicting their pseudorandom number hits?

EDIT: 0 time reaction, perfect aim (whether leaded, predicted or not) are what the computer's about, to compensate for its limited creativity.

03-28-10 23:09 #

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kristus
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Of course. You can make it know where every monster and item are on the map at all times.

EDIT: Yes, the lack of cognitive thinking processes and ability to improvise can be made up for with superhuman abilities in aim and movement.

Last edited by kristus on 03-28-10 at 23:19

03-28-10 23:14 #

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gggmork
Senior Member

Posts: 1943
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Yeah I know imps and stuff have ai, but its retarded like 'walk toward doomguy, even if into a wall, and shoot randomly if you see him'. Never played deathmatch, so didn't even know there were cpu controlled doomguys but suspect they're equally stupid.
And yeah, it seems like computer vision and hard stuff like that might not matter so much because the ai could know all the internal data without having to 'see' (maybe afaik) and even know the pseudorandom numbers.
I don't play many modern games, but remember people saying gears of war had good ai but that was mostly the same simple enemy behavior except they occasionally hid behind stuff (imo doom behavior and gameplay in general is far more fun than that).
It would be hard to make the ai figure out a fast route for any map thrown at it.. probably have to use heuristics for that instead of explicitly telling it what to do. Other hard things would be maximizing infighting, generally navigating around to avoid stuff, choosing which enemies to kill first (like pain elementals/viles/hitscanners maybe) and strategy can vary from map to map, even things like using vile blasts to reach higher areas quicker. There was one map where you could not shoot whenever you saw an evil eye thing on the screen or viles would warp; it'd probably fail playing such a map.
Maybe with genetic programming or reinforcement learning or something like that so the bot 'evolves' its tactics/strategy on its own. I'm just a novice programmer.

03-28-10 23:49 #

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Phml
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Yeah, this is obviously not SP. But making SP playing bots should be even easier than making DM playing.

Nah. Making AI for SP is much, much harder than DM. In any game, DM is very predictable and repetitive, you fight the same opponents in the same map everytime, the only goal is to kill opponents. Move, pick up weapons, pick up powerups as soon as possible, shoot at your foes. It's relatively straightforward.

Compare with SP where you have to define an optimal route, taking not only layout in consideration, but monster, ammo and health placement, possible glides, AV jumps, pressing switches/opening doors in specific order, target prioritization, risk management... There's much more things at work.

There's tons of bots who can rival with players in DM games, yet no SP AI ever competes with good humans in FPS... Closest that I've seen to working SP AI would be L4D (using console to make them play as an all-bot survivor team), even then they're still far below any decent player in skill level.

03-29-10 00:08 #

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kristus
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Shows how much you know about playing DM.

Also, the AI used for friendly AI in games like HL2 and L4D is hardly comparable to that of Dueling games in sophistication. Even if the bots are pretty stupid in Q3 and QL, they are still have leaps and bounds better AI than the friendlies in source games, which are just regular monsters with a few added abilities like the uncanny ability to block your way when you're in a narrow staircase.

Last edited by kristus on 03-29-10 at 00:31

03-29-10 00:25 #

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Phml
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I've been playing DM on Doom, Quake, Q3, Tribes 1 and 2, ET:QW, FEAR, Crysis and a few korean games you've most likely never heard of. I'm also not clear on what exactly my experience or supposed lack thereof in playing DM has to do with comparing AI programming and efficiency between DM and SP, although if I had to guess I'd suppose you've misinterpreted my reply as "DM doesn't require much thought" and got butthurt by that - either this, or it was just a completely offtopic retort because you're mad I don't agree with your opinion.

The AI in L4D hasn't much to do with the AI in HL�, which had a very simple "follow player, shoot at enemies" routine. To compare the two shows you haven't even done research on the topic (or consider just playing the game superficially to be "research"), as L4D AI is much more advanced than that, with complex decision making on the fly regarding pretty much everything. It's far from perfect for sure, but certainly the best effort I've seen personally, and many big names in the industry share that opinion.

Judging by your aggressive tone, I can tell you're not looking for discussion and are going to troll until you get the last word, so I'll just stop here. It's not like I'm an expert myself anyway, but I am interested in the topic enough to know the basics - and frankly, anyone who does wouldn't make the claims you do.

Rest assured that while silent, I'll be looking forward to either your Doom AI program that will concur with the best DSDA times or the bullshit excuses you'll make up to justify not doing something that is, according to your own words, "even easier than DM".

03-29-10 03:53 #

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Spleen
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Someone made some coop bots for Skulltag here - http://skulltag.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10618.

But these only follow the player around. So the main thing missing is a pathing algorithm, which can figure out where the exit is, and how to get there. I'm not aware of anyone having made something like that, but it's likely easier in DOOM than full 3D games, because you only have to calculate the path on a 2-dimensional grid (as opposed to a 3-dimensional grid)

03-29-10 12:39 #

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kristus
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Phml said:
stuff

I certainly don't want to argue. But absurd statements where you claim that DM is more predictable than SP makes me believe you don't know what you're talking about.

Outsmarting an actual player that knows what he's doing is a whole lot harder than to play an SP map/game any day of the week. In particular in a game like Doom where you can predict the monsters movement down to a tee. It should be a whole lot easier to make a bot able to do the same predictions of the AI in Doom than to do it of an actual player in Quake3. Just because you've played a bunch of games against other people doesn't mean that you played anyone difficult, or even went into learning the ropes.

Now I am not a pro at DM by any means, but I've spent a lot of time watching and sometimes playing pros, reading about strategies and movement tricks, etc.
Unlike you I don't have an large array of different games that I claim to have reached any greater understanding of. It's basically only Doom, Quake3/Live and ETQW that I've spent any real considerable time getting to learn the games and players. But I doubt that is what you've done in either of the games you've played. Just playing the game a while doesn't make you understand it. You can play a game for years without actually getting anywhere because you don't push yourself to reach something more. And honestly, I doubt you have done that in either of the cases you listed.

As for L4D, I never played it. It's wrong of me to assume anything about the AI in a game I never played. But the whole premise seem extremely dull to me.

03-29-10 13:03 #

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Spleen
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kristus said:

Outsmarting an actual player that knows what he's doing is a whole lot harder than to play an SP map/game any day of the week.

It's not necessary, though. Bots can simply use their instant reaction speed to dodge almost any incoming projectiles, and their perfect aim to shoot the player perfectly with hitscan weapons. Projectile awareness has been implemented in Quake bots, but not DOOM bots, so they seem relatively weak in comparison. The gap between a properly implemented bot with a perfect aim and reaction speed, and a human with a ~200 millisecond reaction speed, is so large that strategy isn't even necessary to defeat a human. As I'm sure you know, reaction speed plays a role in both aim and dodging, so its effect is multiplied.

The difficulty with a Single Player bot is analyzing the map and understanding how to get to the exit, rather than being able to defeat enemies.

Last edited by Spleen on 03-29-10 at 13:25

03-29-10 13:18 #

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Gez
Why don't I have a custom title by now?!

Posts: 7036
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There's a big difference between single-player-like AI and deathmatch-like AI. Unless, I suppose, there are some people out there who enjoy having their deathmatch staggered by keyhunts and switch puzzles. Doesn't Doom deathmatch give you all the keys, though?

Single-play is objective-oriented: go there, do that, and follow the list of objectives until the mission is complete and you can exit the map. Deathmatch is fight-oriented, it doesn't matter where you go or what you do as long as you dodge attacks and frag your enemies.

Sure, the combat-related AI has to be better for deathmatch, since -- at least in Doom... -- players are a lot more mobile than monsters, and of course more unpredictable and tactically savvy than the dumb Doom monsters. But the pathfinding process is actually much harder.

The easy way out is to script the bots. You put special nodes and markers in the map that tell the bots that here they can do this or should do that. You won't have bots coming up on their own with stuff like rocket-jumping onto a decorative ledge then straferun from that to a platform and shoot a switch through a window during your fall so that a door gets opened by the time they lit on the ground for just enough time for them to go through it. Players might, but bots won't, unless you script that sequence in; which isn't going to happen if this example was actually a sequence break that the map author never thought of.

On the other hand, the combat AI of a coop bot can afford to be a lot simpler, since the combat AI of a Doom monster basically amounts to "walk randomly around, stop, stand still while firing, goto 10".

03-29-10 13:26 #

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Spleen
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Gez said:

The easy way out is to script the bots. You put special nodes and markers in the map that tell the bots that here they can do this or should do that. You won't have bots coming up on their own with stuff like rocket-jumping onto a decorative ledge then straferun from that to a platform and shoot a switch through a window during your fall so that a door gets opened by the time they lit on the ground for just enough time for them to go through it. Players might, but bots won't, unless you script that sequence in; which isn't going to happen if this example was actually a sequence break that the map author never thought of.

Of course, this won't work if you make bots that are supposed to work with any map. :P Even automating the node-placement process is a difficult problem. Where as you can easily make a Deathmatch bot that can work with most standard maps.

03-29-10 13:32 #

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Jonathan
I am not a leet hax0r :(

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This is something I've thought about from time to time and I think it would be a really fun project to try and make a SP bot that could play levels that it had never encountered before.

One question is, how exactly would the bot interface with the game? If you were to take it to an extreme, you could have a standard copy of Doom running, then capture all the video and audio output and send it to a bot running as a separate program. It would then analyse the input and take action by sending simulated mouse movement and key presses back to the game. A bot like this would have to perform some serious image and audio analysis just to have even the most basic interaction with the game, and realistically speaking, it'd just be way too hard.

Instead, you'd have to provide a simplified, somewhat more integrated interface between the bot and the game. So you might send an update every tic, in which you provide the bot's position in 3D space, plus an enumeration of all the walls, floors and entities within its field of vision. But what other information do you provide? Do you supply the damage types of floors? The vector of projectiles? Do you restrict the depth of view in dark areas? By how much? Do you indicate line specials? The more information you provide, the easier it would be to write a bot, but the less "pure" the bot would be.

If you were to define this interface, then you could really have some fun. You could set up a server running a modified version of Doom and let people submit bots, written in some specially designed interpreted programming language, that would be place in randomly selected levels. The bots could then be scored based on the number of enemies they destroyed, the levels they completed, etc, and you could have leaderboards of the best AI. I know similar things have been done for Mario and some other games, but Doom would be especially fun.

03-29-10 23:46 #

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Gez
Why don't I have a custom title by now?!

Posts: 7036
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Jonathan said:
But what other information do you provide? Do you supply the damage types of floors? The vector of projectiles? Do you restrict the depth of view in dark areas? By how much? Do you indicate line specials? The more information you provide, the easier it would be to write a bot, but the less "pure" the bot would be.

The bot needs to know everything a player does. So, not the damage type of the floor, but the floor texture used, so that it can compare it to its database and guess whether it might be damaging or not. E.g., "nukage and lava are practically always damaging, blood usually is but not always, those glowing blue flats are nearly never damaging but it happens, grass is not damaging unless the level maker was a kind of a jerk." It should also be able to identify teleport textures and the like. The textures on walls need to be given as well, so that it may likewise guess if it's a switch or a door. Might also look for subtle secret clues such as misaligning or abrupt change to a different yet similar texture (e.g. E1M1 secret tunnel to courtyard). The "EXIT" texture is important to recognize too, as well as the DOORBLU/RED/YEL/etc. textures, and actors like the Heretic orb statues that serve the same purpose. You'd probably have to use a neural network system so that the bot can experiment and learn.

And of course it would have to be told the position and movement of any visible actor, including projectiles; players can dodge them can't they?

It would be a pretty sweet project for an AI specialist.

03-30-10 00:08 #

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gggmork
Senior Member

Posts: 1943
Registered: 06-07

This mario ai is quite impressive to me:

I only read half of the 'super mario evolution' pdf here so far:
http://julian.togelius.com/
looks like reinforcement learning (reward/punishment I think) and artificial evolution was used.

Last edited by gggmork on 03-30-10 at 20:33

03-30-10 02:25 #

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GhostlyDeath
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I wrote an experimental Doom Artificial Intelligence that could complete certain Doom levels to a certain extent. I wrote it around 2 years ago using flawed methods and no knowledge of any Calculus. I also wasn't that experienced with the Doom Engine as I am now. It worked to a certain extent but it didn't really work.

Of Deathmatch:

http://sites.google.com/site/ghostl...redirects=0&d=1
http://sites.google.com/site/ghostl...redirects=0&d=1
http://sites.google.com/site/ghostl...redirects=0&d=1

Of Solo/Coop:

https://sites.google.com/site/kapti...redirects=0&d=1 (Google reports Nov 24, 2009 2:59 PM but this is really the Pages -> Sites transition date for my pages site), this is a clip of a bot trying to gather the clip in the exit room in Map 01.

This was all just a hack and I now know how to do it all efficiently and correctly.

EDIT: I should add that these bots figured out where to go on their own (kinda, if you remove me coding this functionality) to where the bot will build a path to it's wanted target. This meant that bots could go around corners and such as seen in the clip demo.

EDIT: You might not think the bot is running around trying to gather that single clip as it looks like it's running around in circles. It's just redetermining it's path since the opposing object could no longer be obtained with the current path. Also the path selection was very shitty, I was using BFS and nothing like A* or whatever. So in short the path was found but it wasn't the best. As I said, it's all for testing nothing release worthy.

Last edited by GhostlyDeath on 03-30-10 at 08:21

03-30-10 08:11 #

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gggmork
Senior Member

Posts: 1943
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Interesting doom2 map 1 solo lmp. bfs = Breadth-first search?
I would barely even know where to begin (I'd have quite a hard time just making a tetris/pacman game) and it seems like lots of knowledge about the doom code and how to interact with it would be required, and that alone would take me forever to figure out, not to mention creating the ai itself.

Last edited by gggmork on 03-30-10 at 20:38

03-30-10 20:31 #

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andrewj
Senior Member

Posts: 1379
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I too experimented with bot stuff, including a "puzzle solver" for handling keyed doors (pretty basic stuff in retrospect), and using A* on GL subsectors for pathing.

Making a bot traverse a path _smoothly_ (like a human would) is actually a lot harder than you'd think. Other difficulties include "jump overs" like going to the red key in MAP02 of DOOM2, I never solved that problem and still don't have a good conceptualisation on how to handle it.

It's one of those things that after a while you achieve what you wanted to see (like a bot traversing a level), and then you're done with it. Good co-op bots, to accompany a human player, don't really need to solve the puzzles anyway, they mainly need to stick with the player (without getting in his/her way) and help fight the monsters.

03-31-10 03:27 #

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