...as long as they are not randomly generated. Just finished up Gig called Shark in the Water where after completion the driver gets away with the hostage as fast as possible.
I think 99% of people who completeted the quest never took a chance to see how the AI actually behaves when met by traffic, but it's... pretty good. Only sad thing is this car disappears like after 30 seconds of giving the hostage.
There's 2 totally different realities for NPCs in Night City.
There are hard coded NPC that don't ever disappear from game until they actually exit your view range.
The hard coded NPC quest cars that take off have very aggressive driving.
And then we of course got the randomly generated NPCs who disappear the second they move outside your immediate vision when panicked, and cars which have their... simpler mechanics to I guess keep the computing demand low, some which seem to despawn whenever you don't look and they are deemed stuck in traffic.
I'd be willing to bet if the game only came for PC and PS5 and Xbox Series X, this game would have been shipped with working traffic AI and none of the disappearing AI would exist, on day one.
When you play for example in PS4 and start a fight, there's a lot of people around you attempting to run away, while at very same specific moment there's entire gang who target the player. Suddenly there's a massive shift in computer load, and what way to release the load faster than instantly deleting units without checking, as long as player isn't watching.
The only way to make that situation not cause like 5 second freeze and 10fps until all NPC's had to be taken out, which aren't of course linked to quest.
So I don't think the problem really was lack of talent to make traffic AI work, it's the decision to ship the game on base generation consoles.
I wonder if in alternative reality CDPR chose to release the game only for next generation consoles in early 2019, and thus the time to downscale the experience never happened. This would have released at least 10-20 people working on them for at least half a year, given them more time to make UI better before release date, fix couple of most glaring visual bugs on cutscenes, caused the game receive far more positive score when this performance fiasco didn't come.
Sure the traffic AI isn't still perfect as you can see from the clip. The car recklessly goes too close to other cars and could start going back and forward in some instances.
Similarly the AI that is used in police chase mod is actually the same AI that is used on police car chase (in quest Rebel Rebel) where there has likely been some success made in all of these months.
Looking toward the future I think there's a good chance that them optimizing the game for PS4 also helps to create better game for high end PC's as well, if they manage to do tricks to reduce unnecessary load and optimize these traffic AI's to use less power. Same goes with combat AI as well.
The more they are able to cut and hammer these algorithms to be smaller and perform about the same, the faster we can see something truly amazing like really really big crowds for PC and hyper aggressive crowded streets with cars.
Only thing I'm little puzzled is why there isn't motorcycles in the road. V is able to drive them just fine, and there are quest instances of them being used.... so is this another "we can't make it to work for random NPC's because then the user has to start calculating the angles and such.
It would be nice to hear what the cause of these problems really was and explain what was done to fix them, once they do 100% surely get fixed at one point.
I think 99% of people who completeted the quest never took a chance to see how the AI actually behaves when met by traffic, but it's... pretty good. Only sad thing is this car disappears like after 30 seconds of giving the hostage.
There's 2 totally different realities for NPCs in Night City.
There are hard coded NPC that don't ever disappear from game until they actually exit your view range.
The hard coded NPC quest cars that take off have very aggressive driving.
And then we of course got the randomly generated NPCs who disappear the second they move outside your immediate vision when panicked, and cars which have their... simpler mechanics to I guess keep the computing demand low, some which seem to despawn whenever you don't look and they are deemed stuck in traffic.
I'd be willing to bet if the game only came for PC and PS5 and Xbox Series X, this game would have been shipped with working traffic AI and none of the disappearing AI would exist, on day one.
When you play for example in PS4 and start a fight, there's a lot of people around you attempting to run away, while at very same specific moment there's entire gang who target the player. Suddenly there's a massive shift in computer load, and what way to release the load faster than instantly deleting units without checking, as long as player isn't watching.
The only way to make that situation not cause like 5 second freeze and 10fps until all NPC's had to be taken out, which aren't of course linked to quest.
So I don't think the problem really was lack of talent to make traffic AI work, it's the decision to ship the game on base generation consoles.
I wonder if in alternative reality CDPR chose to release the game only for next generation consoles in early 2019, and thus the time to downscale the experience never happened. This would have released at least 10-20 people working on them for at least half a year, given them more time to make UI better before release date, fix couple of most glaring visual bugs on cutscenes, caused the game receive far more positive score when this performance fiasco didn't come.
Sure the traffic AI isn't still perfect as you can see from the clip. The car recklessly goes too close to other cars and could start going back and forward in some instances.
Similarly the AI that is used in police chase mod is actually the same AI that is used on police car chase (in quest Rebel Rebel) where there has likely been some success made in all of these months.
Looking toward the future I think there's a good chance that them optimizing the game for PS4 also helps to create better game for high end PC's as well, if they manage to do tricks to reduce unnecessary load and optimize these traffic AI's to use less power. Same goes with combat AI as well.
The more they are able to cut and hammer these algorithms to be smaller and perform about the same, the faster we can see something truly amazing like really really big crowds for PC and hyper aggressive crowded streets with cars.
Only thing I'm little puzzled is why there isn't motorcycles in the road. V is able to drive them just fine, and there are quest instances of them being used.... so is this another "we can't make it to work for random NPC's because then the user has to start calculating the angles and such.
It would be nice to hear what the cause of these problems really was and explain what was done to fix them, once they do 100% surely get fixed at one point.