LAIR Thread - * Rules: post #469
- Thread starter Eagle-Vision
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Someone made this drawing comparing Lair to Lost Planet, i found it funny as hell.
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/1048/laircomparevr4.jpg
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/1048/laircomparevr4.jpg
In that case thanks.
That is true that many of the soldiers move in sync to save processing power (like in TW up till Rome where de-sync was made optional) but isn't that more a sacrifice for allowing more random events (fast moving enemy dragon) and budget restrains (motion capture sessions can't be cheap).
I thought it was more about how the AI acts, it does move back, forth and to the sides trying to attack the dragon from the side/behind unless the dragon is in front of a square where the soldiers then just keep formation and move forward (at least that's how I interpret the videos).
To me Lair just doesn't seem like the kind of title where we can ask for more elaborate AI (I do not have that high expectations for CELL), that task should be for soly land based army vs army games like the next instalment of Total War or Kingdom Under Fire (I so hope they'll keep the huge battles, been playing it since it was an RTS on PC)
LOL, quite a nightmare.
Had I known French was a language then I would have taken a different class in high school.
The dragon doesn't move fast all the time. And I actually watch the videos both in full speed and slow-motion.
So do I
A geeky pair we are.
Agreed.
I'm only defending the engine, as a game there's many other upcoming titles which I'm much more interested in.
Haven't seen any graphics from Fable yet the ideas behind it really have me going though Peter should be slapped for some of his ideas.
True and it is also the reason why I defend Factor 5's engine for lair, something I wouldn't have bothered to do in other forums.
We can make statements like that the fire is horrible and the fluid dynamics could have been better but in the end we should keep in mind that it's only being made by ~80 people (in comparison 160 are working on Crysis; according to my knowledge) and it's confined to run on a PS3.
Factor 5 isn't standing back for the other devs but are pushing the PS3 really hard (in comparison).
Pretty interesting interview here that I hadn't seen posted before:
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/04/qa_with_factor_5_chief_julian_eggebrecht.html
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/04/qa_with_factor_5_chief_julian_eggebrecht.html
Hopefully it will be when released
.I really hope that at e3 this game will be show without all this secret that i don't understand Guys, let's put an end to the Uncharted off topic talk, please.
If some of you guys have divergent opinions on that game technology, that's fine. But let's try to keep the argumentation materials for a more appropriate thread, like a thread about it, for instance.
oh ok im sorry farid and just that i love that game so much,please forgive me
mckmas8808
Legend
Hopefully it will be when released
Of course it will. It comes out this year.
I understand now that it should see a July release date in Europe.
archangelmorph
Veteran
More elaborate AI in a game like Lair has little to do with insufficiencies with respect to the hardware and much more to do with development resources and time spent putting together the systems to handle it..
AI doesn't really push modern processing hardware very far at all and thus can always be improved provided your software engineers are upto the task..
Advanced de-synch AI does require quite a bit of the CPU. There are games that have 1000s of enemies on screen but the AI is simple, if they would use more advanced AI they would have to cut the numbers of enemies down by quite a bit. The reason why games that have multiplayer bots only have a small number of enemies. AI has to check where to go, what to do, how to survive, how to react and more.
archangelmorph
Veteran
It depends on the kind of game, kind of hardware and kind of AI you're doing/using..
AI is really a broad term which encapsulates so much and depending on the game can vary in terms of the kind of processing that is required..
Perception + decision encompass pretty much all the useful areas and both of these are game dependant (in terms of scope) AND allow you to implement solutions in various different ways..
In the end the AI engineers are only really concerned about making the entities "seem smart" which, provided you go about it in a clever way, can allow for many optimisations to and generalisations of an intelligence model to give you good results..
The only way AI can really put a choke hold on your hardware is when your iterating through hundreds/thousands of units on-screen.. This is good for something like an RTS or a 1st/3rd person action game with hundreds/thousands of enemies on-screen but there's still incredible scope for optimising the model to get it to run faster (RTS games for example could work very well with significantly simplified perception systems or a third person action game with vast armies on screen would have scalable AI constrained to the player's proximity etc..)
In the end no developer will ever tell you that the AI model puts a bigger strain on the framerate than the renderer as its a problem that can be dealt with in much more creative and elaborate ways without sacrificing too much in the way of the end results..
I don't know how they did it, but Creative Assembly's Total War series has more convincing AI than Lair by a long shot and TW deals with at least 2000 soldiers at a time. They even desync animations.
OFF topic. I was actually contemplating buying the gold edition yesterday. Now I definitely am. Only $29.99 :smile:
IMHO 60fps feel much more fluid and smoother, and animated better and smoother too.
Well, I think they should push the PS3 even further to get Lair to run at 60fps withut any compromise. I pretty sure that the PS3 is capable of running game like Lair at 60fps with any sacrifice.
Naboomagnoli
Newcomer
It's simple really - it's because the troop AI is the sole focus of Total War, and has been developed over the course of nearly 10 years, whereas the AI of the ground troops in Lair is by no means the centre-piece.
PSman said:
Depends on the game. Obviously it'll feel smoother when it's at a higher frame rate, but some games require it more than others - fast-paced games need the extra fps, but slower games can afford to relax the framerate in favour of better effects, or can actually use the slower framerate as a nod towards the 24fps(?) of movies for a more authentic experience.
IMO.
2000 soldiers is a little bit different than up to 25,000, so I'd expect a gap in the sophistication of AI. I guess the question is which is better - larger numbers, or fewer with more complex AI. And as mentioned, this is one of just many sub-systems at work here in this game, so there's likely an issue (unfortunately) of developer time and focus, compared to an RTS game where army AI is all-important.
(That said, I think more than 2,000 is possible in Rome: Total War. I thought I had read before that 'practical' games in R:TW can feature up to 6 or 7k soldiers on the battlefield, with up to 10k possible in custom matches and the like).
(That said, I think more than 2,000 is possible in Rome: Total War. I thought I had read before that 'practical' games in R:TW can feature up to 6 or 7k soldiers on the battlefield, with up to 10k possible in custom matches and the like).
As for the dragon head comparison pic, my take is it's not LOD but just different models for different situations:
- ground fight, with hundreds of soldiers on-screen (-> low-poly model)
- dragon duel in mid-air (-> midium-poly model)
- after the enemy dragon is defeated, it's like a semi-cutscene where the dragon is automatically navigated without physics simulation (-> high-poly model)
- ground fight, with hundreds of soldiers on-screen (-> low-poly model)
- dragon duel in mid-air (-> midium-poly model)
- after the enemy dragon is defeated, it's like a semi-cutscene where the dragon is automatically navigated without physics simulation (-> high-poly model)
I'm just saying that it is possible and has been done with considerably lesser powered systems. I'm not saying that F5 sucks if they can't match it. I agree that troop AI is vital to TW whereas it is not vital to Lair, but that doesn't mean that F5 is off the hook entirely.
Well, after playing Dynasty Warriors and Ninety-Nine Nights, I cannot fathom being interested in the numbers more than the intelligence. At first it's cool, but it only takes about a demo's amount of play time before you realize there's no depth to it at all. They're there for you to annihilate but you've already done that. After the realization, they're just annoyances.
That's my understanding as well. I had misread Lair's soldier count as 2,500 instead of 25,000. Oops.
There's a third developer commentary video up on gametrailers now, and a video about Lair's music:
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2657
The third vid deals with physical fighting mechanics, combos and reward systems etc.
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2657
The third vid deals with physical fighting mechanics, combos and reward systems etc.
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