Warp wrote:

>   One trend in gaming which seems to be becoming popular is to try to make
> the games as immersive as possible.
> 
>   First-person shooters are pictured from the point of view of the
> character itself, but still the vast majority of FPS games fail to be
> *really* immersive, like you *really* were there, rather than feeling
> that you are simply watching the TV.

Yeah, I definitely get that.

On the other hand... it's pretty hard to devise a game that's really, 
truly immersive. Part of the problem is that today we have real-looking 
humans like Alyx Vance, but they still don't behave in a particularly 
real way yet. [Because simulating the human brain, or even some vast 
simplification of it, is still a theoretical research project, not a 
real-world possibility.]

Actually, just the other day I was playing CSS (yes, I realise that's 
pretty ancient by now) and I was struck by just how stupid the 
computer-controlled players are:

- On one hand, a bot runs along a belcony, jumps down in front of where 
I'm hiding, instantly notices me hidden in the corner and kills me with 
a single shot to the head. Very few humans could ever do that. On the 
other hand, that's because bots don't "see" the way a human does. They 
*know* exactly where you are, and have random time delays and random 
mis-aim factors added in.

- The bots have absurd difficulty navigating obsticles. I watched one 
bot spend 150 seconds trying to get past a pillar in the middle of the 
room. A single step either to the left or the right would have instantly 
solved the problem, and yet the bot stood there, his face half burried 
in the wall, jumping up and down and trying to shoot the wall out of the 
way.

- The bots have a ludicrous lack of tactical awareness:

   + Oh no! There's an enemy shooting me! Let me just stand still in 
front of him while I casually reload...

   + Oh no! All my teamates at bomsite B have just died, and now the 
bomb has been planted! Well, I've been stood at bomsite A since the 
start of the round, and I haven't seen or heard a thing, but I guess I 
should spent a few minutes checking that the bomb isn't here. Rather 
than, say, run to the other bombsite in time to actually defuse the bomb...

   + Oh no! All my teamates are dead! I should continue sitting here 
guarding this empty alleyway. Rather than, say, go attempt to complete 
the objective or something before the timelimit runs out...

   + My personal favourit: The whole team gets mowed down in one corner 
of the map. The one remaining bot in the team goes "where could they be?"

It strikes me that an ant typically has no problem navigating around 
obsticles. I wonder how big an ant's brain is? Or how good its eyesight 
is, for that matter. I don't know if this is just because CSS sucks 
(it's quite old now) or whether people still haven't figured out a way 
to fix this kind of thing.

Actually, to be honest, I have no clue how you even implement something 
like a bot for an FPS in the first place. The CSS bots are better than 
anything *I* could implement! o_O

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