Declined AI for Tanki

[vegan_donuts 37]

Tanki could benefit from use of machine learning AI in several ways....

 

 

1) Anti-cheat system...

 

It's my understanding that Madness was taken away because they couldn't get the anti-cheat system to work well on it. What if an AI were observing every battle. If AI can drive a car these days, surely it can see when someone in a battle is using a jump-hack. Couldn't every battle have an AI observer for this? And then we could bring back Madness :)

 

 

2) As players...

 

Obviously the more players there are the more fun the game is and the easier it is to attract new players. So how about some AI players. Not just generic ones, but permanent ones, they start at Recruit and work their way up the same we everyone does, they have to earn their crystals. They call you noob and tell you to drop a gold in the game chat, when someone types in Russian they say "speak English!", they friend you and then unfriend you for no reason, when an update is posted in the forum they swear they're leaving the game, maybe a couple of them could even start their own youtube channels. But most importantly is just that they compete like real players, and that they can play at least at a noob level, and not through programming but machine learning. Just hook up the system to Tanki and let it learn how to play by itself. Just tweak it to prevent it from becoming too pro.

 

AND... if that worked, if you could get AI to play and chat and act fairly indistinguishably from a typical noob player, I would be happy playing Tanki against just AI players. For a subscription, which I would gladly pay, you could give me MY OWN VERSION of Tanki. You let me customize it. I'll set it for the year 2015, when Vulcan was king, and I could play forever and never have to worry about not having players to play against or noob updates or my tank getting nerfed. As long as the AI's called me a noob once in awhile and said "I hate Vulcan!" it would feel real and I would be happy as a pig in mud.

 

 

3) Map building...

 

I just saw an article a couple weeks ago about machine learning being really good at building Doom2 maps. I'm sure the same system would do well making Tanki maps. And Tanki could really use some new maps. The technology is there, why not use it?

 

Just my thoughts. I'm sure all of this kind of thing is the way of the future of game development.

 

 

[Maf 32,338]

Declined

 

First of all, an AI anti-cheat and AI players (bots) are two completely different things that are hardly related to one another.

 

"AI anti-cheat" isn't any different to an actual anti-cheat. In fact, what you suggest seems to be much more complex and inefficient than normal anti-cheat. You say that AI can drive a car nowadays. That's true, but let's not forget that self-driving cars have millions of dollars of research and development behind them, which is not something Tanki can do for an anti-cheat system. Besides, you want this "AI" to literally observe an image of the battle and find hackers better than a human would. Not only would this require sci-fi levels of software, but it's again, much less efficient than a standard anti-cheat. The current anti-cheat does work and it does block a lot of the cheats, but some inevitably slip by unnoticed and are hard even for a human to distinguish and differentiate it from lag.

 

AI bots won't ever happen in Tanki outside the tutorial. Devs said on many occasions that the idea of fighting only real players is one of Tanki's main selling points, so they don't want to add any non-human enemies.

 

The map making system in Tanki is extremely basic, so creating a new system that makes balanced, interesting, quality maps would me a huge undertaking that doesn't bring much benefit to the game anyway. There's already plenty of maps in Tanki, many of which never even get used.

[BlackEliteEnemy2 250]

Maps never get used because devs don't want to.

[Zehmiel 223]

This is already implemented in the game for the last 4 years. :)