Creatures: Behavior

Suggestions
1

As the Dev’s have explained in their now numerous Devlogs, the creatures of Boundless will eventually have different behavior and reactions to encountering players. I would like to go along and give a few ideas for their behavior, as well as invite the community to come up with their own ideas for how creatures could behave in a later stage of Boundless. The point of this is so that if you attack a creature, its not going to just sit there going “Hit…Hit…Hit.” Its going to try to get away or even fall back to retaliate against you.

NOTE: Some behaviors could perhaps chain into each other. For example, STALK can lead to TAUNT, and in turn lead to full on attack or DART.

  • List item Passive Creatures: These are the mostly peaceful, friendly creatures.

HERD Behavior: Herd animals would tend to hang around in Groups of 6-7 members of varying age, and can be provoked if a player approaches suddenly or with a weapon. If spooked, they will either move away, or preform an intimidating animation to show the player that they are too close. If the player hurts or kills a member of the herd, they would run away and form a protective wall around the weaker members of the herd. If the Passive creature is by themselves, then they will either run away from the player and avoid them, or engage the player.

FLOCK Behavior: These animals will also roam and graze in groups, and would actively avoid other creatures and players. If a member of the flock (7-10 members strong) hears or sees a predator or player, they would let out a loud warning call, and all members of the flock would start running. If the flock is divided, then they would act individually, before trying to regroup.

PROTECTIVE Behavior: This is an in general behavior that could apply to several different creatures. If a member of the Pack/Herd is seriously wounded, then other members would engage the attacker and defend the wounded member. This could also be put into pets and other player friendly creatures.

SAFEGUARD Behavior: If a player gives food to a particular creature, over time, that same creature would follow you around and even defend you from attack. They would not however say with you forever, because if you forget to feed them or cant feed them, they will eventually leave you. ( :sob: )

  • List item Aggressive Behavior: Mean and nasty, these animals are devilishly smart and cruel hunters.

STALK Behavior: This behavior triggers when a player wittingly or unwittingly passes the pack. They will follow the player, making some noises as the dart around behind the player. If the player try to look at them, they will hide and try to avoid the players gaze. If the player pulls a weapon or starts printing, then it will chain activate TAUNT behavior

TAUNT Behavior: Activated from STALK or just a natural behavior of the Creature (as in Gremlins and Flyers), TAUNT Behavior sets the creatures into a loud and annoying game. They could jump in quickly, doing small amounts of damage to the player. However, if the play draws a weapon and manages to damage the creatures, or if the player falls below 50% HP, DART or Attack will engage for the pack.

DART Behavior: Following TAUNT, This behavior would also activate upon damaging particular enemies. In a Pack, members of the group would dart in and out of the players attack range, moving fast and dealing minimal damage. In groups of three or four members, this wouldn’t be such a problem, but in groups of five to seven members, it would become very dangerous to the player.

Thats all for now on my ideas and thoughts on creature behavior in Boundless. I hope I have given you guys some ideas of your own on how you want the creatures to interact and behave around the player, and would love to hear your guys feedback. Great job yo the devs on their progress so far, and good luck to them in the near future. Enjoy, and Build Boundlessly.

9 Likes
2

Nice concepts man. How bought a behavior where a creature gets injured and runs away to a nest where traps are laid. Maybe a symbiotic relationship where attacking one animal causes the more dangerous symbiont to attack so you have to be careful around the first creature

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3

Something really interesting would be to tie the day/night cycle to the behavior of some creatures.e.g.:

  • Creatures that are passive during the day but aggressive during the night
  • Creatures that spread out during the day but gather during the night.
  • Creatures that have a ranged attack during the day but use melee attacks during the night
  • Different loottables dependent on whether it is day or night

It would also be cool if some creatures would react to player numbers, e.g. run away if several players approach it simultaneously but fight if a player is alone.

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4

That’s a behavior I have not seen in a game before, a sort of risk analysis for mob ai. Usually they just attack anything in their agro radius without a thought for self preservation.

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5

I support this idea. Swarm and flock behaviour would be Very interesting.
Maybe it does not even need to be a highly evolved AI in a sense of generic or evolving AI (although it would be rad and amazing) - It could be more fun for the developers to give creatures individual behaviour skills, which are obviously recognizable by the player. Like a hand or mind crafted AI. If you create a generic AI it would be amazing, and result into unforseeable and endlessly different behaviours probably. It is comparable to throwing different colors onto a canvas and see how the paint mixes up with each other. Results would be awesome but different to an object related painting where the artist steers arms, hands and brush in order to put on paper what is in his or her head.

3 Likes
6

I think it would be an absolutely awesome after 1.0 feature.
Maybe they could add some kind of fungal hivemind with a learning algorithm as AI. So they slowely evolve and adapt to how we fight them.
But this would of course also increase the server strain so there’s that.

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:smiley: Pretty neat idea!
I have no idea about servers and their capabilities. I sometimes wonder about the performance of B. Because it runs so well even with several other players around. GA.ME had a statement in their firm profile wich related to Superpowered Social Games. I still wonder what is meant by superpowered - if it is the prowess of the developers or if it is the size and speed of their servers. So … hm … no clue.

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How about having some creatures follow you when you go near them and refuse to leave

1 Like
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I nice idea in theory… but where does it end. And how does that affect new players just entering the game for the first time?

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It doesn’t end^^ (Well it ends when you shut down the server but theoretically it doesn’t^^)

New players would need to ask older players about this special kind of fungus. Which would foster the social part of the game.
Or they could try out different tactics on their own and maybe find new ways to defeat them because the older players already tried everything they could think of but the fungus just analized them too well.

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I think learning ai would work well for a single player game, but I think it would be quite difficult to make work in a persistent world with potentially thousands of players.

That would be one hell of a piece of AI scripting too - I tip my hat to anyone that manages to achieve it^^

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12

Didn’t say it would be easy^^ But sure as hell damn amazing to have it^^

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13

I do like that type of behaviour, could be cool having that

14

I’m pretty sure something like that is what leads to skynet and the apocalypse.

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Yea probably but hey at least we had a fun time in Boundless^^

But honestly no^^ This won’t bring us any closer to skynet than a chess bot^^

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I already asked them long ago if they plan to update the AI.

The answer is really clear, Yes. Your ideas in general are good but i’d wait for the new AI and more creatures before i could say what behaviors i’d like to see on what type of creature.

Learning AI for a MMO is a hard challenge. Do you heard about AlphaGo ? They need a super computer (1.2k cores) for teaching a computer the game GO :smiley: I also see learning AI more in a singleplayer game.

TBH i’m not sure what’s the outcome of learning AI in a MMO because we all would try to kill them with different approaches and in as result the creature would be “just” shy like normal animals in the nature (they don’t even try to fight humans in normal cases they just run away).

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I heard about it yes^^ But I think it’s a bit different.
Anyway. It would still be cool^^

Since it’s a fungus it most likely wouldn’t run away :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: But I think it depends. It could as well just be ultra defensive/offensive. Maybe even learn and copy attributes from the enemies it kills and feeds on^^
But that would be even more advanced and might never happen^^

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It shows what you need for “real” learning (that was my point). Of Go is not B< but if you like the AI to learn and adapt to the players you need a lot of computational force.

My primary argument is exactly this. This will (always) result in extreme behaviors (always run away, always attack, always fight till 10% and than run away) because we always try to kill them. So why don’t invest the time in a good but static AI instead of wasting a LOT of development time trying to make it dynamic.

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Always depends on how deep you want to make the learning and how you program it but it sure takes some considerable ressources.

No it won’t always result in extremes because we adapt too.
As soon as it is so defensive that we won’t attack it as much, it will most likely soften up the defence because it doesn’t need such a strong defence anymore.
Especially the always running away, always attack part is bothering me. It’s dynamic like you said so there won’t ever be an “always doing x”.
And consequently because it is always changing and challenging it wouldn’t be a waste of development time at all.
The “lot” part also depends on how deep you make the learning.

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I think you could still add a certain element of randomness to AI, but it would still be based around predefined rules… so “always fight till 10%” could result in “and then run away” or “and then attack with added force in a last ditch attempt” or “run to the nearest [same creature] and get backup”.

They’d be predefined responses sure, but they could be randomised on a per-encounter basis - you’d never really know what outcome you would get until the end of the encounter. You remove that familiarity of knowing how a creature will react every time.

That for me would be a pretty fun way to go for creature AI for a game like B<.

4 Likes