Notes

• motivation: fun and understandable rather than smart and unbeatable
• every actor has their own model of the world that describes their knowledge of its state. partial knowledge as well. this picture shows a marine trying to find a covenant elite warrior. this information comes from perceiving the world in a physically plausible way
  • no cheating! the AI system only has access to the actor's knowledge model, not the actual state of characters in the world
  • four of the six senses - vision, hearing, touch and ESP (through scripting only, and for knowing where friends are).
• originally we intended this to be a complete model with all actors tracking perception information for everyone in their visual range.
  • we only model the sections of the world that are relevant to combat - characters, vehicles, and dangerous events like grenades and weapon fire.
  • too complicated - O(n^2) for n=25. instead actors only track characters that are important to them, n around 3 for friends, 5 for enemies
  • nice outcome: every actor's decisions depend on their own local situation which is easier for the player to understand
• this gives human players the ability to reason about an actor's knowledge, which lets them take advantage of the AI thought processes, so they can feel like the coolest space ninja commando that there ever was