Story AI is basically having a writer sit down and writing a branching story tree with writing the whole way. At best it's a manually coded directed acyclic graph.
Tactical AI, ie having the bad guy soldiers move about the battlefield and shooting back at you in a realistic manner is 100% about faking it. It's better to despawn non-visible and badly placed enemies and spawn well placed non-visible enemies than have some super smart AI relocate the badly placed enemies into better locations. It's better to have simple mechanisms that lead to difficult to understand behavior than complex behavior that leads to instinctive behavior.
There was an amazing presentation at gdc maybe 3 years ago that perfectly articulated this. The game was something about rockets chasing each other. I wish I could find the link.
Story AI is basically having a writer sit down and writing a branching story tree with writing the whole way. At best it's a manually coded directed acyclic graph.
Tactical AI, ie having the bad guy soldiers move about the battlefield and shooting back at you in a realistic manner is 100% about faking it. It's better to despawn non-visible and badly placed enemies and spawn well placed non-visible enemies than have some super smart AI relocate the badly placed enemies into better locations. It's better to have simple mechanisms that lead to difficult to understand behavior than complex behavior that leads to instinctive behavior.
There was an amazing presentation at gdc maybe 3 years ago that perfectly articulated this. The game was something about rockets chasing each other. I wish I could find the link.