[HN Gopher] Emergent Behavior in Skyrim's Fox AI
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Emergent Behavior in Skyrim's Fox AI
Author : kjeetgill
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-01-15 00:03 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eurogamer.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eurogamer.net)
| vmception wrote:
| I wonder if we can trick an animal to guide us in the physical
| world using this density concept
|
| I guess its kind of what seafarers did with birds
|
| But I'm thinking more about altering an environment to make
| animal non player characters assist humans
| WJW wrote:
| Well training animals to do basic tasks is literally thousands
| of years old, but using this density concept probably won't fly
| since the real life "grid" is pretty much infinitely dense.
| (yes yes the Planck length is technically a limit, but that is
| not a concern for anything alive)
| H8crilA wrote:
| Wouldn't it only cause the fox to stop at treasure areas rather
| than run towards such areas? Still, overall it looks like the fox
| leads you to stuff, but I'm just trying to understand.
| 01acheru wrote:
| "The fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to
| get 100 _triangles_ away."
|
| When escaping, if they get nearby a "dense" zone, their
| behavior makes them run towards it since there are more
| triangles to hop to and it makes them "feel like" they are
| farther away from you, instead they will keep running around in
| the same "dense" area.
|
| Well... maybe I could've explained it better but yeah, it's
| more or less like this.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah the cost for denser triangles is lower, so it'll run 50
| meters for 100 triangles in a camp rather than run 200 meters
| in open field.
| criticaltinker wrote:
| Previous HN discussion regarding the original tweet:
|
| Why wild foxes led you to treasure in Skyrim
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28230305 4 Months ago | 221
| comments
|
| Transcribed text of tweets (for convenience):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28230677
| onion2k wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress is good for this sort of thing.. Especially the
| famous case of the poisoned cats
| https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-04-13-why-dwarf-fort...
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Here's the bug report where players figure out what is
| happening 2 comments in, if you don't want to watch a 40 minute
| video (I almost never watch video and find them slow and boring
| and regret the loss of text in the web)
|
| https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The difference being that DF is specifically designed for
| emergent behaviour because it's probably the most system-driven
| game in existence - this fox AI feature is totally accidental.
|
| I really love emergent gameplay and I only say this because I
| was rather let down by skyrim's lack of emergence compared to
| morrowind.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| What are the examples of emergence in Morrowind?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The best examples are related to the magic and alchemy
| systems: you can break the game in many different ways, the
| classic one being to use fortify intelligence potions to
| boost your alchemy skill and then make new fortify
| intelligence potions until you have effectively infinite
| skill and extremely valuable potions. You can also use
| levitation and chameleon spells to access areas or items
| early.
|
| It's not a /very/ emergent game but it has more to offer
| than skyrim. The speedrun completes in something like 10
| minutes using a variety of exploits.
| gifnamething wrote:
| That doesn't seem like emergent behaviour
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Emergent behaviour is higher order behaviour that is
| created by interaction between rules. The rules "higher
| INT = better potions" and "fortify INT potion increases
| INT" are the rules that interact to form a positive
| feedback loop of infinite INT. That's emergence.
| pjm331 wrote:
| I may be wrong on this but I also feel like Skyrim lacked
| the kinds of magical items Morrowind had that basically
| required you to think up clever magical hacks to make
| them useful eg Boots of Blinding Speed
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah that's true - morrowind has game breaking items like
| boots of blinding speed, where you need to abuse the
| games mechanics to make them actually useful. Same with
| the jumping scroll you find early on - if you just use
| it, you're gonna die from fall damage.
|
| By the end of my last (vanilla) playthrough I could fly
| through the sky like superman at 100mph, you really can't
| do things like that in skyrim.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| That's a really hard to read article which is summarizing a
| couple of tweets.
| bjterry wrote:
| Here's the original tweet, for those interested. The content is
| essentially identical either way:
| https://twitter.com/JoelBurgess/status/1428008041887281157
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Thanks for the original link! I find it so hard to read text
| with animated gifs right below them. I literally had to
| scroll the gifs off the screen to read the test. Its just too
| distracting and there's no stop animation option on twitter.
| Its just incredible how this world is made for people who
| have high levels of on-demand focus and there's no care for
| us who don't have that skill or neurotypicality.
| argvargc wrote:
| Well... 13 tweets, but they're a good read nonetheless.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Indeed. The TL;DR of the whole thing seems to be:
|
| Spooked foxes aim to be 100 "triangles" away from the player on
| a pathfinding mesh. Where are they likely to run into the 100th
| triangle? In a place with a lot of pathing points, so it'll
| often lead you to a camp or something interesting.
|
| ^fits in one tweet and no cookie wall minigame required
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Which is funny because we have so much story telling and myth
| that suggests the same thing. Our hero lost somewhere follows
| a wild animal which brings him to food or water or treasure
| or shelter.
|
| In real life, animals might also be seeking out that 100th
| triangle. In low density areas like fields they are super
| exposed to predators and the elements so if chased or
| watched, they'll go to places with complexity and resources.
| I think this is a very amusing and interesting parallel
| between the virtual worlds we build and the real one nature
| built.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Emergent gameplay as they describe it, "the bubbling cauldron of
| overlapping systems", is really what makes Bethesda games so
| successful.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Skyrim isn't very emergent though - morrowind is moreso, but
| for emergent gameplay you want to look at dwarf fortress, SS13
| or many roguelikes. If anything, Bethesda have been simplifying
| their games through the years.
| jsd1982 wrote:
| It's not really emergent behavior, just merely an unintended
| consequence of tons of compromises in implementation.
| kortex wrote:
| Emergent just means a more complex behavior (foxes tending to
| flee towards interactivity-dense areas) resulting from a
| simpler rule (while fox.spooked, maintain 100 triangles of
| distance away).
|
| Flocking is an emergent behavior that is basically minimizing a
| loss function of "maintain x distance". If you implemented boid
| AI (birds) in skyrim and used triangle count as your metric,
| you'd be able to spot points of interest by the sudden increase
| in density of flocks. But players might extrapolate to the idea
| that "birds flock denser in cities". But no one programmed that
| behavior. It just emerged.
| exdsq wrote:
| An unintended consequence that adds a feature is an emergent
| behavior isn't it?
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| Leaky abstraction in a nutshell!
|
| Really fun little tidbit, loved it.
| LambdaTrain wrote:
| Just want to make sure if I correctly understand what it means by
| "triangle": For navigation, the developer triangularize the
| skyrim world, and these divided triangles are not the same size -
| for example, a 100-sq feet field is covered by one triangle,
| while a 100-sq feet point of interest is more complicated and
| covered by more triangles. The original design intention is that
| the number of triangles encodes the sense of distance, but
| maximizing the #triangles actually leads to interesting places.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Right. Another way to think about it is if you reproject the
| Skyrim map so that each navmesh tri is equally big, a
| surprisingly large area would be taken up by points of
| interest, and foxes target a random point in a radius around
| the current point in that reprojected map.
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