Re: Fare Thee Well, Piranha Bytes

On Fri, 12 Jul 2024 10:40:17 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 11/07/2024 16:59, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

Oblivion I know was touted for its AI but I can honestly say that I
didn't really notice it besides one side quest where you had to follow
an NPC to resolve what was happening oh and my horse gaining a mind of
its own and the ability to walk about six foot in the air!

A lot of Bethesda's "Radiant AI" was cutback even in Oblivion (and
made practically braindead in Fallout 3, Skyrim and later games) but
it still was caught doing quite random things at time. Before being
hobbled, it was reported that the AI-controlled NPCs would start
raiding other people's houses for food when they got hungry, for
instance.

To me it's ok for important NPC's to have fairly fixed schedules as you
can relatively easy fudge why that would be but I would like to see more
filler NPC's just doing anything. That's seems a fair balance between
the two.
It one of the things I would actually support AI for, providing filler
content that isn't important to the overall plot but instead there just
to add a level of realism.

I'm not crazy about modern LLMs being used in video games. Partly
because I know it will be used as another reason to tie the game to a
'live service' economy where the game requires constant online access,
and becomes unplayable if and when the publisher pulls the plug. But
also because while LLMs are good at spinning stories, they fail at
consistency and matching tone. Eventually, maybe we'll get there...
but I don't think the technology is anywhere near ready.

* it takes about a football pitch's -roughly an acre- worth of land to
feed a person for a year. A town of 10,000 would need 15 square miles
of farmland to feed it. More if you took into consideration the land
needed to feed the farmers, fallow lands, the inefficiencies of
medieval farming, etc. IIRC, there was a 10:1 ratio of farmers to
city-dwellers in medieval times, because you NEEDED that many
tillers-of-the-soil to keep even the smallest cities fed!

Not sure of the exactly numbers but yes it's quite easy to forget that
it wasn't that long ago that food production was one of the main
activities of societies and you couldn't just pop down the shop and buy
anything you want.

It's actually been reversed in modern times. Now 1 farmer can support
10 people (worldwide average. I think it's even higher in areas with
modern industrial farming).