The Sun, in the grand scheme of things

I agree that there are alien designs that look comical to us, such as the Daleks from Doctor Who. But wouldn't it be possible to create alien designs that fit the game's style?

The in-game robots do not know or have no need for many of earth's aesthetics. They are functional*. (Actually there is an terrestrial architectural school with this point of view: Bauhaus.) Many of the original Total Annihilation units were functional. Notably The Can. And in Supreme Commander, The Brick.

Yet purely functional alien designs may not be appealing to the human player. They still have to look cool.

In short, an alien robot unit design should be:

• alien and mechanical
• functional, rational
• fit the game style
• cool
• within the game's technical specifications

*) It's an assumption. Perhaps the robots develop their own culture and less-functional aesthetics. It depends on the story. In Total Annihilation both the Arm and Core originate from humans.

Competition is but one element of play. There is a type of player who primarily wants to escape into the game's universe. There is another type of player who wants to tinker with the mechanics and explore interactions.

See this post about player taxonomies.

The role of the AI depends on the application.

AI design begins with finding the most optimal play. If the game must be winnable, the next step is to scale back the optimal play in order to "lose convincingly".

If the goal is to replace a human player with an AI, then patterns, randomization, flaws and restrictions are added to mimic human behavior. Recreating human behavior is an exceptionally hard task. This type of AI is intended for practicing multi-player games. However, a human AI wouldn't fit the game's universe.

On the other hand, a believable single-player experience requires a robot-like AI. It must still be able to be defeated, therefore it cannot have an optimal play. A robot-like AI can manifest itself in other ways that gives the human player the idea of battling a robot. For example, in the way it lays out buildings in patterns, how it is able to multitask, how it times its construction orders. For the experience type player, this AI adds to a more believable universe. For the mechanics type player such an AI would be like cracking a puzzle.

Suggestion. Have several AI behaviors:

• AI plays like a human player (for multi-player practice)
• AI behaves as a robot (for single-player immersion)

The problem is, unless you're not a robot, you are unable to imagine, what's inside a robots mind.
Indeed you are unable to imagine at all, unless there is no such thing as imagination for robots.

You are bound to the parameters of perception . You cannot have a vision, perception or imagination of something else without the influences that you have as a human being.
You might could try to not be affected by your own perception, but it never will work.
You only could mimic.

Sorry for the bad english.

Alright, throwing out some wild stuff for ideas.


Talros http://talros.deviantart.com







The Angels of Evangelion



Macross Vajra




Wayne Barlowe

http://waynebarlowe.wordpress.com/artwork/expedition/






Tabnir http://tabnir.deviantart.com/





Steve Burg http://steve-burg.deviantart.com/

Forged alliance tried to do some alien design with Seraphim. They seemed just stereotypical aliens (if you can say that) with all the fancy floating building parts and shiny materials. Aliens tend to be bunch of hippies in movies and games.

"Normal buildings are too mainstream, let's make floating buildings instead"

War itself is kinda human invention so it's difficult to imagine alien designed war machines when there isn't any real reason to even have them.

Some pretty interesting ideas in there. I like.

The do the aliens from the battleship movie, and put the UEF to shame with their block technology.

I like the pics from Talros. But anyway: It is a cool design created by a human mind.

The Angels of Evangelion didn't even cross my mind. I would love to have a Sachiel army, backed up by a Ramiel. That would be so OP. The Talras bots are also very good drawings, I like those all very much. To hell with it, I liked every picture you posted.

I fail to see what is the problem.

From a Lore point of view is PA going to be set in a TA type world in which the war never ended? All Humans are dead ofc. All that is left is the commanders and their programming that basically tells them to go to war? but still the Robots feel no need to change the aesthetics as they don't care for that sort of thing just if it effectively shoots/moves and is economical as possible its fine.

I don't know if it will ever be revealed but for the tiny amount of personal immersion i'll need for a game like this i'm going to imagine that they are a human project still carrying out their dead masters orders years after the last one died out.

From a pure economic point of view, they are purposely trying to keep the units simple for money reasons

The age of humanity has long past. The endless conflict continues to march into the vast darkness of space. Battles rage across the cold void: annihilating planets, moons, and asteroids; cosmic obliteration for a purpose long forgotten. Technology has been captured, assimilated, refined, and transformed into brutally efficient self-replicating mechanisms of war.

They have been all over the universe. Surely they must have found some goodies that beats terrestrial technology along the way? The planes, tanks and bots we have been shown so far are not so different from the stuff we can build nowadays.



TA and SupCom demonstrated more alien designs than we see in the PA trailer. And I bet Uber have been working on more interesting things than they have unveiled. But it wouldn't hurt to see some more wacky stuff on this forum.

Indeed. Why bother with an overwrought design when a simple cube does the job? It can still be awesome. As long as it makes sense from the in-game lore: brutally efficient self-replicating mechanisms of war.

planes design is dictated more by aerodynamics than by human aesthetics. And as we get into higher and higher performance systems, aesthetic becomes less of a concern. We can apply the same logic to tanks and boats and so on. Yes we can add all kinds of tentacles to things, but why do that when a gun or missile pod is more useful?

Not necessarily tentacles, but more smooth designs or "strange" legs for bots. A humanoid leg is not ideal in some situations, so a more "alien" design is required. I will also continue to support having tentacle-like legs for bots, hence my obsession with War of the Worlds tripods.

Finding the most "optimal play" for such an advanced game as TA or SupCom is a daunting task.

Even if the person programming the AI knows the "optimal play" of TA or SupCom he might not be able to program the AI to make the optimal decisions ingame.

I'd argue that it is impossible to find the "optimal play" for TA or SupCom because there are to many variables and blind guesses that have to be done without knowing what the enemy does.

What I said was based on the following text from a research paper:

The suggestion to incorporate multiple AI behaviors still stands. A robotic AI type that's like a puzzle to solve and a human-like AI type to practice multi-player games.

"Age of Humanity has passed" which means in the PA world there has been an age of humanity, they are probably implying this because humanity started this war.

How many ways are there to get around really? lets keep it simple and just focus on land vehicles

Legs
Wheels
Tracks
Anti Grav

I personally don't want a unit that is just a floating cube spewing lasers out of it, it isn't thinking outside the box (Pardon the pun) its just been - in my eyes - lazy.

I understand that you are wanting unique looking units, but is looking to an old Sci-Fi series really the best idea?

All Uber can do is use their human imaginations to come up with something that looks good without it looking stupid (I.E Borg Cubes... I never liked Borg Cubes)

Plus as I said before from a lore standpoint would robots really need to change as long as it remained effective? They robots may have a humanoid appearance but using Technology that "has been captured, assimilated, refined, and transformed" doesn't mean that the robots will look different. What if both factions were human in the initial war and no formidable alien life was found and thus the only technology that can be refined is that based on technology developed by human tech and captured by the other side, if that makes any sense.

I personally don't care I like the "norm" with human looking units as in RTS games I tend to play the Human Faction or the Faction that most closely resembles today's militaries.

Link:http://ilk.uvt.nl/~pspronck/pubs/BNAIC08Bakkes.pdf
Interesting read.
And they used the Spring engine. :shock:
They didn't say what game they they used but I'd guess Balanced Annihilation.

Buro and Furtak doesn't say that an "optimal game AI" should be implemented to "obtain consistency in the game environment". They rather say that we should develop AIs that can compete with humans in RTS because it is the next step in AI development.
Article:https://skatgame.net/mburo/ps/BRIMS-04.pdf
Although I do agree that in order keep consistency in the game world, an optimal AI would be able to utilize the game mechanics to the fullest and therefore be able to make optimal decisions. So it wouldn't get stuck in a wall or place a turret where its' line of fire is blocked.
You could then scale the difficulty by making the AI perform less optimally without having the AI place turrets in holes or just run into defences all the time.

But the whole point of the article that Buro and Furtak made is to promote development of AIs that can beat humans according to the rules in the ORTS project that is explained in their article.

Making an AI with "optimal play" in PA is a daunting task yet to be accomplished for such an advanced game as PA. If it is possible to achieve optimal play in PA that is.
However implementing a "Rapidly adapting game AI" as proposed by the Bakkers article could be an interesting way to adjust the AI difficulty against new and medium skilled players.

So, more locomotion types?
-Crawling. Because nothing is more terrifying than a snail! (Optional : force any PA player to first read Uzumaki, for better effect).
-Hopping (kangaroo, pogo sticks). It is surprisingly efficient, and it does look original.
-Rolling/falling. Instead of wheels, it's the entire unit that spins. Round units would roll, long units would fall, rise on the other side, fall again... The round version has been done quite a lot, but the falling one may be rarer.
-Spinning. Because spinning-tops of death!
-Micro-teleportation. The unit stays immobile, and move with a short-range, fast-reload teleporter. I have yet to see a unit having that as a standard mode of movement.

The only really interesting in the list above, IMO, the micro-teleportation would be original and may have interesting gameplay effects. How would the pathing engine react is another problem. Though I'd like to see hopping bots, just for fun.


Oh, and even remotely human aliens (as in, nearly anything we can imagine) anywhere close enough to interact with us is neither realistic nor awesome, so don't bother with those.