Massive Crowd on Assassin's Creed Unity: AI Recycling

[@arsenkurmangali2997]

Crowds in unity are still really impressive. They nailed revolutuion atmosphere for sure

[@knoxctry1569]

Yeah the numbers were impressive. But their actions and intelligence were pretty much rough and became pointless and boring after a short playthrough though the game

[@arsenkurmangali2997]

Yeah they only serve as decoration and sometimes you can use them to hide ftom guards, but you know im okay with that. Just seeing giant crowd from the top of notre dam was epic. And still beats Cyberpunk's Npcs xd

[@knoxctry1569]

Exactly... NPCs in Unity or mostly in open world games serve as decoration and making sense that the world is basically alive and nothing more, but their interactions differ the most between them; some have very good scripted NPCs A.I that interact accordingly with your behaviors other not. Nonetheless I hope we see more advanced AI and physics around this gen of consoles.....

[@arsenkurmangali2997]

@@knoxctry1569 i agree, graphics developed a lot this decade but AI and Physics are still pretty much overlooked. I mean F.E.A.R is 2005 game that has better enemy IA than most modern shooters

[@colesonfox]

I wasn't much of a fan because you could see the same character about 30 times I'm every direction. I'd rather have smaller crowds then copy pasts of AIs

[@Polygonal_Sprite]

I’d love to see Ubisoft revisit these size of crowds in the next gen AC considering the size of the CPU leap over generations.

[@knoxctry1569]

I would love them to ditch the new sh!tty RPG mechanics and return the old school mechanics and gameplay

[@AhbibHaald]

@@knoxctry1569 they were clunky as shit

[@sagii86]

@@S.... There is a limit on how low they can get. The overall lowest requirements for games massively changed in the last few years. A low-mid range rig is still far more capable than it was 8 years ago.

[@khed7104]

Ac unity makes me sad because if there were allowed to polish the game and finish their vision maybe the ac series would have taken a different direction and would still be as amazing as the first few games

[@pipgoesthepossum]

Yup. If AC Unity had launched 6 months later, I think it would've been received as a classic. It was bleeding edge, and still is in some ways.

[@phlegios]

IMO, the first 2-4 games (Altair + Ezio) were great in terms of introduction of the world manipulation, as in, you could scale any building, you could do basic actions against any NPC but, at the same time, that was their downfall. Much like the guys who worked on the Hitman series that were always proud of their crowd AI, in reality, both in AC and in Hitman the crowds were built as a simple as it can be AI dummies to sell the picture of a populated world while they could only do 2 basic things divided into two states: peaceful roaming (passive dummy), where the dummy is harmless (ordinary citizen), and the 2nd type was the "soldier" which you could provoke into reaction by acting in a hostile manner towards it. Later on, in the future AC games, Ubisoft added patrolling AI and expanded their number of actions into 1 or 3 more, like, for example, the ability to sound the alarm, chase the player, steal, stuff like that (although in the early games about Ezio this already existed as a sub-class of a soldier... those thief-like agile guards). The point I'm trying to make is that while there can be hundreds if not several hundreds of NPCs present at the same time in one scene, overall, their only role is to play the crowd, which does nothing other than fill up space in a scene. It's known that complex AI demands a lot of computational power, and putting even 10 or so of these complex AIs in a level, having the same freedom of agency, not to mention being as high poly in terms of rendering as the main protagonist which players control, would crash the local system (PC/console) of said player. Right now it's a zero-sum game: you either have a ton of AI dummies with high-end graphics or more in-depth AI logic written into NPCs but at the cost of the visual aspect; unfortunately, both marketers and some gamers prefer the beauty instead of functionality.

[@GonziHere]

@@phlegios I get your point, but that variable level of detail will always be needed and it also allows you to do things like Watchdogs Legion. The whole point of that system is to mix "smart" interaction with "dumb" crowd.

[@phlegios]

@@GonziHere true, though, personally, I'd rather have a shorter but more qualitative experience instead of an open world with lots and lots of simpletons spawning and running around me, he-he.

[@knoxctry1569]

AC Syndicate “Victory” makes me pretty much sad every time I see those leaked images. Had a lot of faith in it back then.

[@pan5473]

Really loved this GDC. Even read the slideshows found somewhere in internet XD It was a great job with awsome results.

[@padavica94]

i'm going to play 20 mins following a guy... for science!

[@mattiapezzano1713]

@@EyefyourGf chill dude.

[@alihouadef5539]

ACU Remake is almost a moral obligation.

[@wasteurtime5677]

its very cool. it does feel like quite a bit of the complexity came in because they were trying to make legacy AI systems work with new AI systems instead of just reworking the legacy AI systems completely. Probably was worth the tradeoff though because the legacy systems spanned several games

[@MrWaketeu]

Very interesting presentation : Unity is the best and more innovative AC game ! I hope it will be available on PS5/XSX with optimisations that take advantages of the stronger CPU ... it was truly amazing that the weak PS4/Xbox One CPU can handle it

[@vast634]

Strange that the low res / medium res versions have their hands in an unnaturally straight default position. "Unused" relaxed hands are usually curved.

[@Ato-id5ux]

when modelling a character its usually easier to have the arms open wide and the hands stretched for rigging, so if you then don't actually rig the hands that's how they stay :) making the "unused" pose realistic would be a nice detail but also work for something nobody is going to see (just a guess though)

[@fsfsdfdsfs1181]

At 8:08, how do you limit the polygons to 300000 while having 10000 npcs? 30 polygons per character?

[@styxrakash4639]

I imagine an NPC that is far away they reduce the polygons quite a bit. And they also only load the polygons from a certain side of the body etc. 30 could be reasonable I think

[@mckensyq]

I really enjoyed this talk

[@SiNevesh]

If only current AAA games were optimised like this.

[@JUANMAS7ER]

Cyberpunk 77 AI developers taking notes after watching this...

[@leonida-sabiri4716]

It's to late unfortunatly

[@JUANMAS7ER]

@@leonida-sabiri4716 Sad but true.

[@knoxctry1569]

All the Witcher games has pretty much dumb AI. I till now can’t figure how The Witcher 3 became that beloved from gaming outlets and modern gamers audiences.

[@JUANMAS7ER]

@@S.... Agreed, is impressive how they carry all the issues in Witcher 3 (from loot design and gear balance, "RPG" perk system, animations, "physics", AI, etc) to Cyberpunk, and that was with 5 years between games...they indeed learned nothing.

[@JUANMAS7ER]

@@S.... Agree again :P overall Witcher 3 was a better game by far.

[@wesam6385]

Great presentation!

[@MichelangeloBedetti]

Future Work: Expectations: make future games more immersive. Reality: make future games more like the Witcher 3.

[@1234sdg131]

Good idea with the npc but why didn't you mention how much cpu is used when you transform npcs between states? Maybe that's why this game is CPU demanding even today.

[@sharp7j]

He mentions its 5us per npc

[@codemonster8443]

22:40

[@Krab-PL]

this is gold!

[@naletovps]

great solution, poor realization

[@fadyedits8681]

Unity is the best Assassin's Creed game

[@PASTRAMIKick]

It seems to me like Cyberpunk 2077 would've benefited greatly from using these techniques

[@knoxctry1569]

The last good AC game but the story was pretty much disappointing

[@DAEDRICDUKE1]

2 was the last good one, everything after is just filler.

[@DAEDRICDUKE1]

@Talion Ranger Did 1 have Ezio? Also, yes.