This pretty much says it all...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt5aUdijAN8

While I do appreciate the fact that an NPC is practically blind if something is covering his eyes, I'm not so thrilled with the idea of him just standing there and letting the player put a bucket over his head. Maybe that can give some thrills with your spouse in the game if you're into that sort of thing, but not with a shopkeeper or guard.

In fact, I can see it now. A thief carrying lots of buckets into a dungeon, and sneaking up behind a bandit in order to blind him. Or even a mage with telekinesis. Hmm, I guess Bethesda DID actually add a non-lethal way of dealing with baddies!

Ps. I wonder if this would have any affect on the Falmer?

As obviously joking-y as this is

Every time I go to put a bucket on their head they find a way to take it off

so lame

My experience with Bethesda's Vapid AI was last night. I won't give spoilers....... A guy asks me to clear out a mine for a misc quest. When I decide to go there him and his idiot friends show up there fighting. They are using low dmg pickaxes and wearing nothing more then cloth shirts and pants. Ok why hire me to do the job if you're going to run there ahead of me and try it yourself and keep dying. I had to reload 4 times because the idiot questgiver kept dying. He was hard to save when him and 3 others are fighting close quarters with enemies and I have a two handed axe that swings wide. It was quite annoying. My last character they didn't go there at all. I just went in and did the job and went back to his house to collect.

I can't give props for the AI, but I can't really fault the game for it, either.

AI is a misnomer; in reality, AI in games is really "SAI" or "Simulated Artificial Intelligence." (or what I like to call "Artificial Stupidity")

No one has of yet come up with true AI; a machine or program that can learn and act intelligently like a human.

No game has ever wowed me with it's AI. Even those games where people applaud the AI left and right seem just as stupid as the AI in Skyrim/Oblivion to me; I really don't see why people praise the AI in games like FEAR.

Radiant AI has nothing to do with NPC AI.

So old and facepalm.

I think the Radiant AI they advertised is the one that makes NPCs react to you based on your story/quest progression.

Like the guards will mention that you joined the Companions or Mages Guild when they saw you.

The combat/non-combat AI has nothing to do with it.

But I guess neither of them are as good as they advertised anyway.

Exactly.

Whenever you see a "smart" AI in a game (usually a shooter) its because he doesn't have that many options to begin with. The AI in a game like this has so many things it has to do it's not even funny. Yet much like Swish Lizard pointed, I always see AI in games getting props and if you know even a little about programming you can see that its usually smoke and mirrors and scripted events.

[b"Radiant A.I. is the dynamic reaction to the player's actions by both NPCs and the game world in Skyrim.
The use of Radiant A.I. crafts a more personal and unpredictable experience for players by tailoring the world in response to the player's past actions and experiences. For example, Radiant A.I. may be used to set a quest objective in a location previously undiscovered by the player and populate that location with enemies who suit the players abilities or detail NPC reactions and behaviours based on past actions.

Radiant A.I. technology has been used (although to a lesser extent) in one other Elder Scrolls game: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It has also been used in other Role-Playing games from Bethesda such as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, in which the two expanded onto it, and gave the developers the idea to expand it fully in Skyrim, but to an extent; there is never a case where the player is unable to do something because of the player character's race, class (or strong skills, in the case of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim) or birthsign.][/b]

What you guys are talking about...is not Radiant AI. Just the AI in general.

Is AI really a misnomer? AI already means it's not real intelligence. Simulated AI seems redundant to me. Sort of like pretend fake intelligence.

It's not called "Radiant" because it's supposed to be bright.



Radiant AI is not "the dynamic reaction to the player's actions." It controls what NPCs (including creatures) do, not just how they react to the player. Beyond controlling those NPCs, it has nothing to do with the game world. Radiant Story is the tool used for making and conditionalizing quests. The game builds a database of the player's actions and experiences. Through Radiant Story, a developer can place conditional checks on that stored information and have the game world respond to it.



Ideally, artificial intelligence is real intelligence, only man-made. In practice, it is generally accepted that AI is not real intelligence.