Thursday, October 1, 2015

AI in Video Games (part 4)


Developers at Hello Games are also using AI to test their game, No Man's Sky, a procedurally generated universe so huge that thousands of players wouldn't be able to playtest everything. Even the developers themselves have admitted that the game's universe is so expansive that they haven't even seen everything. Normally, no publisher would release a game with content that developers have not personally inspected and tested, so how can a game this large be released to the public? The nearly infinite algorithm used to create the game's universe produced tens of millions of planets with unique lifeforms inhabiting the planets, dynamically breeding as time progresses. The developing team could not possibly playtest the game and see everything the algorithm had created, so they designed virtual, automated AI drones that journeyed throughout the game universe, taking screenshots and sending them back to the team for viewing. With procedural generation, huge amounts of game content can be created without the need for hundreds of dedicated developers, and with AI playtesters, games can be tweaked and bugs fixed without the need for thousands of hours of playtesting.

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