The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life (1999)

Re:The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life ... by vvanders on Saturday January 16, 2021 @04:37PM (#25805738)

As with everything in gamedev it comes down to one thing: performance. Anything that can be faked, approximated our outright hacked in the name of perf or memory will be.

The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half-Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple. If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade" and navigate to the nearest nav node.

Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind that behavior but it was just a couple of really well telegraphed "if()" checks.

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Re:The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life ... by indigochill on Saturday January 16, 2021 @06:00PM (#25806338)

This anecdote reminds me of the AI in the original F.E.A.R game as well, which did something similar. The actual AI good on its own, but their barks did an -amazing- job telegraphing their behaviors. Like if they shout "flank him!" and then flank, you know because they announced it that the AI made the conscious decision to flank and it wasn't just some NPC incidentally wandering into a flanking position.

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Re:The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life ... by formerly_proven on Saturday January 16, 2021 @06:50PM (#25806682)

There's a talk somewhere about the F.E.A.R. 1 AI and there were two key changes made in the development: 1) it was restricted so that only a handful of actors can actually attack the player at the same time 2) introducing loud radio chatter because playtesters grew frustrated dying over and over to the AI just flanking them quietly. Before these changes playtesters were frustrated because they thought the AI is cheating (which it isn't).

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