What is AI-Life in your humble opinion ?

[Flachdrache]

moin, i keep reading to [re]implement AI-Life ... what do you understand as AI-Life ?

.a group of stalkers helped me with a chimera ..
.while art-hunting i heard snorks and boars fighting - later found 1 living boar, attacking me

.please do not post a vid from old engine - it had better path finding / terrain reasoning

ps: seams like fraction war is not fully implemented (duty guys walking around with army)

thx

[Flachdrache]

for clarification .. army should not be part of any fraction war .. they should not even appear anywhere but boarder patrol points imho.

[GrenadeMagnet6]

It was an overhyped feature that never should have been announced. It's like promising to build an independent Stalker NPC/Mutant Life simulation in parallel to your own game. There was no way to develop and debug it to deliver on it's promises.

Everybody should just let A-Life drop, as it's never going to be implemented in Stalker 2 as promised. It's a waste of one's own time to keep demand and asking about it. But if that's how some people like to spend their time, then so be it, of course.

[HiggsLP]

What do you mean faction war fully implemented?
Duty wants to get rid of zone? Ward has more or less same obj?
At beginning of game Duty was aggroing me so hard, now they come to help me while Ive promised to get Zone under comtrol, other factions have srarted to aggro me instead.

[Flachdrache]

What do you mean faction war fully implemented?
Duty wants to get rid of zone? Ward has more or less same obj?

>>
Duty lost - Freedom won .. the Warden group gives a leg up to Duty e.g. not enemy not friend. Warden group wants to control the zone and sell it's wonders - Duty will not imho.

At beginning of game Duty was aggroing me so hard, now they come to help me while Ive promised to get Zone under comtrol, other factions have srarted to aggro me instead.

>>
Duty never attack me unless i shot first .. is only spark and warden till monolith in main quest afaik.

>>
My take here was, that different groups walk and fight together - so, i have to pick only group members of 'my' enemy group >> the others simply do not care.

>>
Mercs attack me at random (friendly usually) w/o a contract it seams

[Flachdrache]

e.g. Mercs used to attack you always because shady business .. ;) now they just take jobs there ?!

[lockwoodx]

A-life for NPCs is taking bio breaks, fighting enemy factions, looting corpses they shot, begging for mercy when critically wounded and turning friendly when spared.

A-life is also Mutants dragging corpses back to bushes, mutants fighting other mutants over corpses, mutants randomly setting off anomalies, and mutants existing in the world without the need for pop-in.

A-life wasn't that complex but it was so much more than what other games offered at the time it seemed ground-breaking and has become an EXPECTED feature of stalker games.

[Sayuri]

Originally posted by GrenadeMagnet6:

was no way to develop and debug it to deliver on it's promises.

And why not? Other open world games, some decades old, have done similar systems successfully, so it's certainly not impossible, so I don't get the "there was no way" part.

[Flachdrache]

Originally posted by lockwoodx:

A-life for NPCs is taking bio breaks, fighting enemy factions, looting corpses they shot, ...

A-life is also Mutants dragging corpses back to bushes, mutants fighting other mutants over corpses, mutants randomly setting off anomalies, and mutants existing in the world without the need for pop-in.

A-life wasn't that complex but it was so much more than what other games offered at the time it seemed ground-breaking and has become an EXPECTED feature of stalker games.

agreed

[Nite69]

a-life is just npc /enemies trying to survive like you are and just makes the game a bit more interesting as you move around the map, the complaints are there isn't enough of it, its empty, they did imrpove it a little in patch 1.1 BUT some enemies still spawn a bit too close to player, some areas spawn too often, some are empty, its not balanced

[Flachdrache]

Originally posted by Sayuri:

Originally posted by GrenadeMagnet6:

was no way to develop and debug it to deliver on it's promises.

And why not? Other open world games, some decades old, have done similar systems successfully, so it's certainly not impossible, so I don't get the "there was no way" part.

agreed .. however, there might be a reason that the map is all small islands, connected by a bridge or not at all - is strange but old games had less tech to carry imho.

[Flachdrache]

later .. got to go

[Joikax]

It's not "AI"-Life, for starters.

[ANGRY MALICE]

Correct me if I am wrong, since I don't know how the system works off screen.
In original games maps were smaller and seperated by load screens. When you load in the map, I think all the npc's were present and active in that map - acting according to their scripting - even if you were not close. Some were patrolling, some were sitting by the fire, some were fighting each other, etc.

While there were larger, scripted sequences that trigger once the player enters the area, smaller stuff seemed to happen independently from the player.

An example - you hang out by the fire with friendly stalkers, but decide to move on to your objective on the other side of the map.
As you are heading to your objective, you see a large pack of dogs running around. Thinking it would be a waste of resources to deal with them, you evade them instead.
While coming back from your objective you see your stalker buddies being eaten by those dogs.
Had you returned sooner, you would have heared or seen them fight those dogs. You could make a choice to help them or leave them to their fate.

Its a mundane decision, that affects the world around you.

In essence - game creates the illusion that life moves on even if you are not around. In S2 things only happen when the player is near.

[Vi'ir Jul K'hane]

https://youtu.be/DjMCZvxcoiw?si=mQOqEFAUJkc-T5fz

[Flachdrache]

ah, ok - so not just artificial life but more like autonomous agents - understood