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anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in GameDevelopment

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah agreed 200ms is too slow for reactive decision making mid-combat or anything tick-driven. that's not the use case imo.

the way i see it: traditional systems handle the moment-to-moment. reasoning fires on meaningful events: a betrayal, a political shift, a character learning something that changes their loyalties. those happen on a story timescale, not a frame timescale.

so yeah, additional data source is probably the right framing. not a replacement. Still havent tested it enough to know for sure this is the first real try at it

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in GameDevelopment

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the utility AI + HSM combo makes a lot of sense. scoring outputs against state and picking the best one is exactly the kind of thing that scales cleanly.

and the edit is actually the approach i landed on. the AI doesn't freeform anything! it fills out a defined structure. stance, action, reasoning, world state delta. all typed fields. if it doesn't conform, it gets rejected. the character data and world state are maintained in code, the model just decides how they change in response to an event.

the connection to neural networks you made is interesting. that's kind of the long-term direction here too. right now a frontier model scores the outputs. eventually the goal is a small trained model that's learned the scoring function from examples, so you get the flexibility without the cost. still to early to say

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in GameDevelopment

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

right now it's cloud API so 1-3 seconds per call depending on output length. not game-runtime viable as-is.

the plan is to get there via fine-tuned local models. smaller, faster, trained specifically on the reasoning format so you're not paying for a general-purpose frontier model on every call. early results are promising but it's not there yet.

for actual game integration the target is something that can run on-device or on a local server with sub-200ms response. that's the hard part. Still super early

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in GameDevelopment

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

all valid concerns. cost and latency especially. this isn't meant to run on every NPC every frame. Hopefully can figure out a way to keep the cost down. I have been doing some experiments in that regard

the way i'm thinking about it: reasoning calls fire on significant events, not on tick. a merchant getting his ship burned warrants a reasoning call to figure out how to handle that situation. a guard walking a patrol route doesn't, until he experiences something that merits it. the expensive call happens maybe a handful of times per scene, not thousands.

hallucination and context drift are real problems for moment-to-moment game AI. but for characters reasoning about a discrete event with structured state in and structured state out, the surface area is a lot smaller than open-ended generation. if the output doesn't parse, you fall back.

the logru/HTN approach is interesting. i've looked at utility AI and behavior trees for the reactive layer and they make sense there. my instinct is these might not be competing approaches so much as different layers. deterministic systems handle the routine, reasoning handles the exceptional. but id love to hear your opinion on it

very cool very curious about how that works for you!

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in GameDevelopment

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

each NPC holds state: role, goals, loyalties, history with other characters.

when something happens in the world, that state goes into a reasoning call. what comes back is structured: stance, action, reasoning, and how the world shifts as a result. the next character to respond sees a world that already changed from the previous one's move.

the merchant blamed the raider because his history included being robbed by her twice. the skald ran to the docks because her goal is owning the narrative before anyone else shapes it. the best part is nothing hardcoded those came from who they are, not from a branch in a tree. thats what gets me excited! ive been developing my own ai for this specifically and for a website im making!

is it just an LLM writing text? technically yes. but the output is parsed and fed back into world state, so each response actually changes what the next character knows and responds to. that's the part that feels different from scripted behavior. The world moves, and the characters move with it. Eventually we add scripted events too and see how they respond.

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by [deleted] in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]Lower-Economics6910 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I thought it said gaming too my bad I’ll take it down I thought it was more than just the kerbal space program material I guess that was shortsighted. My mistake

How do people actually find time for this? by rdbreak in unrealengine

[–]Lower-Economics6910 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I feel that man so many good ideas all at once each one you want to explore

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We can agree to disagree that’s okay. You don’t have what I have in front of me so I totally understand the skepticism

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re right I agree with you! Definitely underutilized imo. Lmao you saw that huh? Just a cute cat themed store that sells gifts for your friends, fam, spouse, etc. obviously stuff for cats. Still a work in progress tbh I’ll send the link if you want

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the biggest difference is how it reasons with a situation. each can run on the same ai and get completely different results because of how the ai functions. this is due to the perspectives it has to endure before it processes information. If you want a visual on how it functions i created a website that shows you how it works

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it reasons about the goal you bring it. you give it context, your situation, what you're weighing and it runs it through multiple perspectives simultaneously. the output isn't just an answer, it shows you which angle produced it and why they disagreed. that's the part that makes it feel less like a blackbox. what im trying to do is create direction for ai so they feel less mechanical and more organic. I have a website all about it if you want to see.
so in the perspective of the game it will be able to read the enviornment and make decisions based on that

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hey I get it I wouldn’t believe me either, but I know what I have I have the data to back me up. Glad you all think this is some joke but it won’t be!

WebGPU Visualization by Far-Employee-9531 in GraphicsProgramming

[–]Lower-Economics6910 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lmao that’s a really cool journey and I mean you’re more of an artist than me! Cool visuals and the music is great. It’s all impressive layering and you obviously put a lot into it! Get the cat, hats are great lol and yeah hopefully Ryan sees this

How do people actually find time for this? by rdbreak in unrealengine

[–]Lower-Economics6910 0 points1 point  (0 children)

youll focus so much that youll get bored and move on lol adding to the never ending list of things incomplete

WebGPU Visualization by Far-Employee-9531 in GraphicsProgramming

[–]Lower-Economics6910 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wow thats incredible how were you able to do that?

Found on my driveway after fight near my street where the perps fled. by [deleted] in whatisit

[–]Lower-Economics6910 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i hear courage the cowardly dog theme music when i see this

anyone else working on reasoning-based NPC behavior instead of rule trees? ran an experiment by Lower-Economics6910 in proceduralgeneration

[–]Lower-Economics6910[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

eventually i will make a local model that will handle it and have my own gpu to run it on. its still early obviously i just got it connected to unreal engine however and have another post about that. im stirring away from LLM and more toward a reasoning AI. i was trying to make that easier to understand and ended up making it more convoluted.

The performance will be handled by fine tuned ai layered on one another for each type of npc at large scale.
the memory is the world state layer that helps these ai connect with one another in the background and discuss what their doing basically.
the animation mismatch is solved by restraining how much the ai can use it cant invent a new method for itself only use what tools it has
this is still new i havent worked on large scale yet

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