How to sandbox a realistic pathing/hunting/combat update

[Drayka 485]

Have a data capture/processing sandbox where players spawn in different locations as different mobs.

 

Participants have to fulfil tasklist of their mob survival requirements, including finding water regularly for mammalian mobs, and inter-mob combat objectives, on an E-vs-E server.

 

Developer/code moderator (to be progressively replaced by pseudo-AI algorithms) then reviews data, refines to strategies to be assigned to normal/traited categories of mobs, or discards strategies as below par.

 

These strategies progressively become inherent 'instincts' for all wild mobs on live servers - the playerbase becomes a mob-AI think-tank, rather than writing a dedicated AI to do the entire task.

 

Participants get in-game rewards to their nominated account for completing successful data-submission tasks.

For example, significant meditating skillgains if opportunities are repeating and widespread

or development credits that can be converted into items/consumables otherwise.

 

If such functionality proved useful to development and became a staple of ongoing gameplay, it could be enabled on player-servers (no chat, no maps, player must play on the EvE server and complete a journal there to gain approval for functionality on player servers).

 

Fine-rug meditating could be updated to trigger spawn-as-mob on random any-other server, with mob name prefixed with 'Wild' on mouseover by players, with massively increased skillgains to anyone lucky enough to interact with a 'Wild' mob.

 

A regular player in combat with a 'Wild' mob calling for guard assistance (even if the guards didn't respond) would abort the 'Wild' functionality and be a failed meditation for the mob-possessing account.

 

List of mobs available to randomly spawn as on player-servers would depend on meditation skill.

Non-mission Traitors would be available at 60 skill. Humanoids at 70 skill. Uniques not including dragons at 80 skill. Dragons at 90 skill.

[Tomatoes 276]

WOW! just WOW! this would work, if the code isn't a royal pain to implement

having the players create a more realistic pathing model would be one heck of a wurm changer. 

 

Kudos. this is one thing we all should hope to see one day!

 

[Archaed 2,280]

So uh, have a minigame where players become mobs and have to achieve certain tasks? This sounds like some weird call of duty setup. 

[Darnok 214]

Maybe for learning AI, creating a new server makes sense, but what if the player could take control of a random mob on server where he is playing?
He would be given a very simple task like:
- find water (animal would have to reach water tile, before meditations ends),
- find food (for herbivores you need to find grass or steppe or some fruit tree),
- avoid people (you have to run away from other players and not get killed),
- attack people (you have to start a fight with another player, but when fight starts, meditation ends and you return to your character),

[belacane 238]

what?

[DaletheGood 1,073]

uh, wtf. just no

[Sheffie 1,120]

How do we translate "here is all the data about how a bunch of sentient beings approach this set of objectives" to "here is a set of instructions for an AI to follow in order to look like it has the same objectives" ?

 

Because I've been a programmer for a long time and I can't see a way. Not in C++, not in lua or python, certainly not in Java.

 

It's not a bad idea but it presupposes a behavioral learning engine that — if it exists — is probably quite expensive to license (because it was very expensive to develop).

[Drayka 485]

8 hours ago, Sheffie said:

It's not a bad idea but it presupposes a behavioral learning engine that — if it exists — is probably quite expensive to license (because it was very expensive to develop).

 

I'm told that the already-developed-by-industry term for the kind of functionality I personally meant, is an 'agent' as opposed to a 'client' or a 'server', but I'm having great difficulty finding any reference to it.

 

If you source any literature on it - I don't care how technical - please point me towards it,  so that I can modify my suggestion to utilise functional structures that have already been developed by programmers for other purposes.