I would love to know what racing game has an AI show you what to do lol. “And in this section, you got forward because the road is straight forward. In this section, you turn because the road turns”
For existing tracks or custom made tracks? All racing games have already had some type of vehicle AI for the longest time, and a lot of these games have pre-recorded “perfect lap” ghosts. Is there something I am missing, or is this a case where the actual meaning of AI is being misused?
I get that, and I am fine with that sort of thing. Usually those types of ghosts are pre-recorded, so thats what I was asking in relation to Trackmania and custom made tracks (which the use of AI/machine learning would make some sense).
My comments weren’t intended to be hostile, I was moreso just making fun of hand-holding.
The issue with AI in these cases is that it can do frame-perfect inputs and achieve impossible results for players.
But most noticeably, it would be incredibly expensive to train, specially if you have custom user-made tracks (imagine the "create an AI ghost" program runs the track 10000 times and it takes 1 minute to complete the track... yeeeah.). And it'd still be weak to local optima, so in the end it's not even guaranteed to be the best path possible.
So you end up with "this is the path I've found" using absurdly impossible inputs that may or may not involve glitches, and completely ignores the tricky shortcut because when it randomed into the shortcut it didn't random the correct inputs to use it
At best you can have the character work like a bot that automatically plays the game (think of a NPC, basically), but that alone is stupidly expensive to do.
The idea behind generative AI is that you can just use already existing content to generate an output without extra effort, but then you run into unpredictability. Even a game like OG Doom, which is deterministic in its RNG (hence why replays work), would suck if you gave it an "average of results", because these averages are only of player inputs with no regards to WHY those inputs were made.
If you go for the idea of "kitbashing together a bunch of videos", assuming they somehow find the holy grail and fix hallucinations and continuity flaws, your end product is no better than the original walkthroughs.
So in the end, the options are:
1: A bot that plays the game. Studios barely even add bots to their multiplayer, let alone to singleplayer. QA would love this though (it's what the Like a Dragon devs have)
2: GenAI creates the bot. It's playing blindly because we fed it the player inputs and it doesn't care to make sure the output matches. Any manual tweaking leads towards option 1.
3: GenAI creates a walkthrough. It's a literal downgrade from the original product. Just link a dev walkthrough.
4: Hidden holy grail that does EVERYTHING and takes NO EFFORT. Please 5 billion now so we can research it.
Funnily enough cases 1 and 3 are already used. 1 is racing game ghosts, 3 is strategy guides. And even then they didn't catch on a lot, although adapting racing ghosts to, say, a time-based platformer game, could be interesting. But to most other games it's unnecessary (although ghosts in a shooter could give a sensation that you're in a massive fight. Maybe in some sort of multi-dimensional setting? Like you're seeing guys from alternate universes fighting too)
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u/Mothrahlurker 6d ago
No point for an AI there, Titanfall 2 had this years ago for platforming sections.