So how much ram would something like that typically use in a typical case scenario? Are we talking about hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes?
It's variable size, but more like megabytes really. It's a cumulative learning process though so the database of player knowledge keeps growing over time. Sports games for example, in current ai eventually you know exactly what the computer will do in every situation to where it just gets downright boring. Now, we know that during testing qa spends hundreds of man hours playing the games before they are shipped. What if all that data were recorded, saved and shipped with the game as the "baseline knowledge". So every move qa makes in every situation, as well as the computers responses and success rates, etc, all of that gets glopped into a massive ai database and ships with the game as the default. So when the player gets the game in his hands he will have typical ai to deal with, supplemented with hundreds of hours of example situations for the code to reference and tweak the ai accordingly. The players data gets added to this database as well when he buys the game and starts playing, and data from people on his friends list can even be merged into this brain as well over time. So it's just keep growing, changing and adapting, the ultimate goal to have a non predictable opponent over time.
You could even have special builds that let qa play as the enemy, so genuine human movements and planning get recorded and added to the database of ai possibilities for situations. Or, when the user plays a game online, record the opponents data and add it to the collective knowledge base as well. I don't really know enough about ai to know if this is the right way to go about the problem since it's a very brute force method, but current ai solutions just aren't working well enough at creating opponents that adapt and change over time so it's an interesting experiment. It does need a lot of ram, but wouldn't it be cool if every week the ai surprised you by doing stuff you never expected.
Shooters can benefit from this as well. What drives me nuts in current shooters is when you die and replay a section, and as I'm walking through the level again, there go all the ai guys exactly where I expect them to go...again. Why is he running to that barricade...again? Why doesn't he head up those stairs? Charge at me? Double team with another ai dude? I mean, just do something different to shatter the illusion that it's a cpu controlling everything. I think all shooters are currently plagued with this. Some try to randomize it a bit with scripts, but it's not enough. And all that online data? If you are playing similar levels online as with single player, then all that human activity could be harvested for ai use by adding it to the knowledge base. So the computer ai over time could know that hmm ok, the player ran along that alley and hid in that corner, and I remember that in that situation in the past L33tHax0r47 ran up the tower and sniper'd him, PlayerHater19 ran into the room and killed him with the shotty, and chiefbootknocka14 tossed a grenade through the window. Ok, this time I'll pick the gernade ai solution to the cowardly human player.
Also in general terms are the software developers feeling 'antsy' yet about trying out new hardware?
It's the opposite problem really. Give a coder new hardware and they are all over it! That's where you can get into horrible trouble if you don't set a baseline. For purposes of code related dram use, the ps3 sets the baseline. It has 256mb of dram of which the os eats some, standard code moduls eat some, and standard graphics needs eat some. Whatever is left is the absolute maximum you can afford to use for this generation of games. Go past it and, well, guess who will be spending late nights at the office until it's fixed
