Julio Jerez wrote:for me the purpose of this is to have a way to generate what in AI parlance is called the ground truth,
basically, what the AI use to compare results. I am not sold yet on the Reinforming learning what makes the AI learn to move around without guidance. So I will use ground truth in the form of animation to provide style.
This raises some obvious question, assuming i understand your intend.
Why do you need AI at all, if you first need to provide a working example in form of a procedural controllers output?
Wouldn't it be easier and faster to just keep using the procedural controller as is?
If the AI has some advantages, e.g. ability to combine / generalize the functionalities of multiple such controllers, can we achieve the same advantage using a higher level blending mechanism over our procedural controllers?
I don't think that's easy to answer, but i'm pretty sure, finally we'll end up at a combination of both.
It's actually a big difference what's our goals. We work on games, not actual robotics. Our main requirement is not the ability to self balance and do backflips, but to have precise control over timing and to have a predictable outcome.
That's why i personally believe we want procedural controllers first, and only approach ML to address complexities we can not model this way in practice. If we want some game about melee combat, we probably have to model the combat system with manually designed controllers.
Otherwise gameplay itself becomes a form of 'content and assets', similar to graphics shaders. It's not code to make the game - it's content made by artists to have some visual impression.
If our character behavior becomes a matter of NNs, the NN is like an asset, lacking specific control to implement game design in a traditional sense of 'write code so it does precisely what you want.'
But that's just me, inventing an argument to justify and self motivate on my approach, and i'm aware i might be totally wrong.
And that's why...
on the competition, I rather have some cooperation.
... we can't have that yet.
It's too early. We don't know how yet, so cooperation won't help us much because it increases the chance of walking the same path of the same failures.
But competition will help. Only competition allows us to see which techniques give us better results than others and when. Failures of individuals become valuable data for a greater community and turn into success in one way or the other, so no work is lost.
No competition, no progress. That just said to make clear i mean it only positively.
Regarding ML, i just came across an interesting story of a Google engineer which was seemingly fired because he stated in public his belief about true consciousness of the chatbot they worked on. See some example chat: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
I've had a similar discussion with a AI chatbot, but that still failed the Turing test on me. The above discussion does not fail at all. I see a bright future for games, once we can approach truly procedural and interactive stories using such tech.
But that's not really the low hanging fruit i guess. Robotics comes first, and it shall end the current stale state of the industry. Standard is high, all games are pretty good and well done, but nothing pops out anymore. Nothing is truly interesting or exciting, but production costs keep increasing, so a crash seems in front of us, if we can't come up with something new.
Also, with all that character centrism we currently see in modern games, we still lack behind other (true) art forms like books or movies very badly. We can express emotions pretty well from static animation data, but this does not fulfill the dynamic requirements our media imposes. It simply does not really work for what we try to do.
So yeah, 10 years later, i'm still convinced dynamic characters is the next big thing for games. But i still only think so, and do not really know.
I often regret my decision to work on lighting instead, and i can no longer resist the desire to come back to characters, although i really shouldn't but keep focused...