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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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Designing artificial intelligence in games seems incredibly challenging, because your goal typically isn’t to build an actual autonomous intelligence; it’s to build an actor, something that can play along with a cast of characters to create the illusion of a real experience.

That’s well in line with the ambitions of Gabriel Robert and Julien Varnier, Ubisoft veterans who most recently led AI teams on two of the company’s flagship games: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Far Cry 4, respectively.

“It's not about doing the ‘best AI’ -- it's about doing AI that have a purpose, from a gameplay point of view,’” Varnier told me last week.

“Yeah,” chimed in Robert. “Really, what we want to do is not build robots, but create actors that can understand the situation.”

The pair were speaking as part of a roundtable discussion with Gamasutra and other outlets at Ubisoft Montreal, where company employees from around the world gathered for the French firm’s seventh annual internal developer conference.

Building actors, rather than robots

"AI is not here to serve a solution; it’s here to entertain the player. To interact with the player."

They were also echoing sentiments commonly expressed by AI programmers to non-AI programmers, as when former Sims 4 programmer and current indie dev Bruce Hill told Gamasutra last year that “Most game AI is designed to be exactly as intelligent as it needs to be in order to give the player a good experience.”

But how, exactly, do you shape machine intelligence to ensure your players have a good experience? At Ubisoft (at least, the aspects of it represented by Robert and Varnier) the answer is to create opportunities for unscripted, player-authored events to happen; that means creating worlds filled with AI that can use and respond to gameplay systems like vehicles, alarms and elephants.

“Systemic worlds are really an important part of how Ubisoft creates engaging worlds,” said Robert. “We think that AI is key for this, and it needs to be shared with the organization.”

“Now everybody is trying to figure out ‘Okay how can we go more systemic, but also have the player at the center of the game?’” Varnier added. “So I really think that when we talk about this in our presentation, we are basically talking about creating an entertaining ecosystem.”

An entertaining ecosystem in Far Cry 4

Varnier and Robert were speaking to press after giving a talk to their compatriots on systemic AI design, the value of restricting access to subsets of your game’s codebase (only AI programmers can touch the AI code, for example) and what they’d each learned in their respective roles as AI tech lead on Far Cry and AI team lead on Assassin’s Creed.

The talk itself was highly technical; in that way (and in others) it was very similar to the sort of talks you see at GDC’s AI Summit. But in chatting about it afterwards, Robert and Varnier shed a bit of light on how and why Ubisoft designs AI systems for open-world games that may be of use to fellow developers.

“I think a sense of scope is really important,” said Robert, explaining that the business of AI design at Ubisoft -- and across much of the game industry -- has changed significantly in the past 15 years. Back then, he recalls AI as being quite simple, so it wasn’t always a massive amount of work to design.

“So often, from one production to another, you would see that people tend to redo the same thing because it’s quite fast, and you don’t really lose a lot,” said Robert. “Now that we have really big games with big scopes, we can’t afford this anymore.”

Robert recalls that when he joined Ubisoft, nearly a decade ago, he was “at the frontier of this, because I was always seeing people relearning how to do behavior trees, decision systems, perception systems” and the like.

Later, after the company’s inaugural UDC, Robert recalls developers at the studio being pushed to share more with other teams

“We had the first UDC and we saw a big shift of strategy at Ubisoft to really go more with sharing, to be sure that we don’t reinvent the wheel each time,” he said. “Because as the scope and size increases, the cost of the wheel increases. So we really want to build on the shoulders of previous projects.”

Open-world game AI should put on a good show -- but not be optimal

Hence why, roughly half a decade later, Robert and Varnier are giving their own little GDC-esque talk to a room full of Ubisoft devs (with more watching remotely, via livestream or internally-shared recordings.) According to Robert, systemic AI design for open-world games is something the company as a whole has to focus on, and newly-minted coders don’t always get why it’s more important to make AI that does what the player thinks it should do, rather than what’s optimal.

“I think it can be a common mistake for junior programmers; often when they think of AI, they think ‘Okay, I want something smart, that can be optimal, that can really show that it’s found the right solution to the problem,’” Robert said. “People in AI programming love to solve problems.”

Developers on Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games want their AI to solve problems, sure -- but only up to a point, and only in a way that makes the player feel satisfied.

“AI is not here to serve a solution; it’s here to entertain the player. To interact with the player. It shouldn’t look stupid (except if we want it to look stupid) but we don’t want it to be optimal,” said Robert. “Often, as programmers, we tend to try and solve problems instead of focusing more on good game design.”

Varnier agrees, and fondly portrays AI programmers as eternally caught somewhere between the technical and the creative sides of game development.

“I like working on AI technology, but AI is also very close to design,” said Varnier. It’s not about doing ‘the best AI’ -- it’s about doing AI that has a purpose, from a gameplay point of view. So we are really doing that tech conversation, but we are also part of the design conversation.”

Big budgets lead to big asset costs, which curtail designer ambition

That also means AI programmers are shackled by both the limits of technology and the tenants of good game design. At Ubisoft, they’re also restricted by the prohibitive expense of developing assets for a big-budget game.

“Sometimes we don’t do an actual AI feature or ability because the scale of producing all the assets to make it look like a 2016 game should could be expensive,” said Varnier. He suggested that from an AI programmer’s perspective, coding an AI to jump over a piece of cover is cheap, especially if it’s already designed to do things like climb ladders.

But the cost of actually animating that cover-clamber, then fleshing it out with some alternate animations (you don’t want your bad guys to move like identical robots, after all) and model-specific moves (slinging an assault rifle vs. one-handing a pistol, for example) might keep the move from being part of the antagonists’ repertoire.

“So obviously...at Ubisoft, and I’m pretty sure it’s true everywhere in the industry, that we’re trying to push more procedural animation,” says Varnier. “If the animation team can provide more animation with more flexibility, it makes the AI job way easier because you know your behaviors do not have a crazy cost in terms of assets.”

The same goes for sound design, as well. Writing, recording and mixing audio samples for NPCs costs time and money, and Varnier and Robert are hoping that one day procedural sound generation tech will get to the point where new AI behaviors can be designed and implemented without driving up asset costs.

“A lot of what make an AI look human, or sound human, is what they say. So it's a real AI problem, because being able to talk about what's going on in a systemic way, it's complex,” said Varnier.

“And it's a big limitation, because every time we want the AI to say something smart, or say something about what's going on, we need to record those lines, we need to edit them, they need to be localized for five or six different languages. So again, it's still a very big upfront cost just to have the AI translate its behavior into something real, in the world.”

Here, again, Varnier and Robert are betting that procedural generation tech (in this case, vocal generators) will advance to the point where they can be used in Ubisoft's big games, which would loosen the big-budget bonds on the scope of what AI teams can try. However, both are quick to say that while AI designers love to get hype about new technology, they try to remember that neat tech and AI tricks aren't worth implementing unless they actually reinforce your game's core design goals.

"There are lots of things that are super-excting right now, but we need to be careful," Varnier tells me. "You need to think about, okay, what's the use? How do we build gameplay around this? Does it serve something?"

As an example, he points to the vaunted Nemesis system in Monolith Productions' 2014 hit Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. It's actually a super-simple system, he says, that doesn't involve any additional AI work at all -- but it makes the game's antagonists seem more alive, more real, just like good AI should.

"We can probably think about AI tech that probably makes that kind of design stronger, more flexible, and deeper. So there's definitely room for AI tech," adds Varnier. "But my point is more to say that obviously, we still need to keep that in sync with design and make sure that AI serves the player, in the end."

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trendingnewsb · 8 years ago

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MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me

Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?

The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?

Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.

They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.

For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?

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Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.

When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.

A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.

The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:

As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?

Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.

In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.

With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.

People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide

The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?

Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.

MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?

People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.

When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?

She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.

Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?

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Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.

Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.

The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.

This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.

Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.

MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June