News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment. Parent comment

Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by cableshaft on Friday November 04, 2016 @05:01PM (#12876075)
I've been to the Game Developer's Conference (once) before. Believe me, there have been startups that have provided A.I. services for years (it was kind of like the equivalent of the Havok engine for physics, you had to implement it into your game). I don't know how well used they are, but I remember them being mentioned at one of the lectures about A.I. that I attended. They had tables and swag, too. I don't remember their names.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by formula1 on Friday November 04, 2016 @06:23PM (#12876673)
Thats really interesting. Im curious why they havent been more popular. Were they heavilly focused on fps's?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by lenocinor on Saturday November 05, 2016 @02:52PM (#12881261)
There are a lot of problems, but mainly I think it boils down to game people, like a lot of programmers, wanting to write something themselves. You'll always understand it better, and it'll be perfectly tailored to your problem. Unless the problem is REALLY hard and takes a long time coding tedious things, they'd rather just do it themselves, since coding something is always more fun than figuring out someone else's code.

Also, out of my experience with many different fields of programming, game programmers seem to want to write more of the stuff themselves than most. This would be another huge subject to go into, but I think the biggest reason is that historically you couldn't ever really punt on performance in games, and you had to tweak everything to your problem. If your game ran slowly or looked bad, people just wouldn't buy it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI re... by quantumpotato_ on Friday November 04, 2016 @11:17PM (#12877960)
In previous years I've seen a lot of AI tech for action-games -- not neccessiarly FPS but shooter in a flat world with obstacles. Eg. marking objects for cover, marking positions to defend from etc.

Doesn't quite apply to a mario style game

[ Parent | on HN ]