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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:22:35 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Fare Thee Well, Piranha Bytes
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2024 11:22:35 -0400
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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).