>The X-Ray Engine uses the proprietary ALife artificial intelligence engine developed by GSC Gameworld. ALife supports more than one thousand characters inhabiting the "Zone" (the in-game term for the 30 km wide area of exclusion surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant). These characters are non-scripted, meaning that AI life can be developed even when not in contact with the player. NPCs have a full life cycle (task accomplishment, combat, rest, feeding and sleep) and the same applies to the many monsters living in the Zone (hunting, attacking Stalkers and other monsters, resting, eating, sleeping). These monsters will migrate in large groups. The non-scripted nature of the characters means that there are an unlimited number of random quests, such as rescuing Stalkers from danger, destroying Stalker renegades, protecting or attacking Stalker camps, and searching for treasure. The AI characters travel around the entire zone as they see fit. Numerous tactics can be employed to complete the game, such as rushing or using stealth and sniping; NPCs will react in different ways to each of them. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s NPCs plan ahead by "Goal-Oriented Action Planning" in order to achieve this.
Why don't more games do this?
The X-Ray Engine uses the proprietary ALife artificial intelligence engine developed by GSC Gameworld...
The only other game I can think of that does anything like this is Oblivion with its radiant AI. It's a shame they abandoned it because it's a pretty novel concept.
stalker 2 isnt going to happen bros
>tes ai compared to a - life
Is this a joke? Get Todds dick out of your ass. A life has its flaws but radiant was so retarded people laugh at it to this day.
a-life wasn't even implemented properly in vanilla SoC
I said the only game that does anything like this, faggot. Barely any games give their NPCs a flexible schedule and as broken as Oblivion is, it's still one of the few that actually tries, retard.
becuase it's completely unpredictible and it makes testing a living hell. i remember a story about late stalker alphas having issues with alife because npcs would take on main story quests and finish them - so, ingame npc gets to the chernobyl power plant before you and triggers all kinds of events that shouldn't be triggered until you'll get there
lofty concept but even base stalker itself doesn't have that. it's in the same boat as the first couple of gothics where you can tell that's what they were going for, and even do a decent job presenting it as what's actually happening, but in practice the only notable events are scripted
adding a "player only" flag to quest objectives was too hard for kurwas to program i guess
It was planned to have others stalkers race for the ending, but the game was all over the place because of that and they canned it in favor of a more linear story
God Damn this woudl be amazing if NPC's in stuff like GTA were more proactive
>Why don't more games do this?
consoles & lazy devs.
triple-A is where innovation and boundary-pushin die thse days.
That's fucking hilarious and should trigger a game over to the player for being stupider than a random script.
>It's a shame they abandoned it because it's a pretty novel concept.
STALKER devs abandoned it too. All the AI does in STALKER is move from one random location to another until they die and when they die a new set is spawned in to replace them. That description in the OP is as bullshit as Bethesda's Oblivion Radiant AI demo. They don't do any of that crap.
And as for why nobody does it anymore, it's because it generally doesn't make for a fun game. There's a reason both Bethesda and GSC largely abandoned it. It has limited application. It's great if you are making something like The Sims but not a narrative driven RPG or FPS or something.
Yeah and then the AI steal your stuff
I love it
Considering how modders actually got the full thing to actually work, no it wasn't bullshit, it was technically achieved as the modders proved, but the actual devs abandoned it because they thought it wouldn't be fun, and it's brutally CPU intensive
>Considering how modders actually got the full thing to actually work, no it wasn't bullshit
Well, by that logic Radiant AI isn't bullshit either.
This crap is the programming equivalent of a bullshot. It's like claiming Skyrim is the best looking game ever because 100GB worth of mods makes it look fantastic. Who gives a shit about mods? The game as released didn't have any of this crap.
Full alife wasn't added by modders though, it does exist in the vanilla game, they just turned it on
Players don't like unpredictability. They want to read a walkthrough which says "Go here, talk to this guy, then go shoot bad guys and collect an item to bring back to him," and get their achievements. NPCs doing their own goals and schedules, basically living out their own storyline, is acceptable and expected for a sim or management game, like Simcity or Dwarf Fortress. However, most of the people who play narrative-focused FPS or Action games would review bomb and complain to no end that they can't figure out the NPC's "RNG" behavior.
I thought there was a-life in CoP?
That's just not true. ALife IS turned on in the base game. It's just that none of the agents are coded to do anything about from hang around a location or travel to another random location.
I hopelessly try to save the npcs only to find them dead later.
Which means the system did work.
Nope. The AI in all STALKER games literally does nothing but spawn at point A, travel to point B, do idle animations for a while at point B, travel to point C, do idle animations for a while at point C, travel back to point A, do idle animations for a while at point A, travel back to point B, etc., etc. If they happen to cross paths with an enemy on the journey then they fight. When a squad dies a new one is spawned to replace it. This is the extent of STALKER's "advanced" ALife system. They jokingly call it "smart terrain" because AI is directed by hardcoded shit in the maps. They do nothing dynamically.