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Why auto-ai exists? (Read 2340 times)

Started by snowy997, December 21, 2024, 12:09:09 am
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Why auto-ai exists?
#1  December 21, 2024, 12:09:09 am
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Something that pisses me off is that in some characters (especially those made by japanese creators), there is a stupid auto-ai that prevents me from playing the character. I want to know, what's the purpose of this? What's the point of creating a whole character if you can't even play it? I understand that being done to boss characters, but still. Is the AI so strong it overtakes the player? I don't understand.
Re: Why auto-ai exists?
#2  December 21, 2024, 12:29:37 am
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A lot of Japanese AI patches are made with watch mode in mind, not player use.  Some of them let you toggle it off in the config file but it's not a standard or anything.
Re: Why auto-ai exists?
#3  December 21, 2024, 06:54:10 am
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Something that pisses me off is that in some characters (especially those made by japanese creators), there is a stupid auto-ai that prevents me from playing the character. I want to know, what's the purpose of this? What's the point of creating a whole character if you can't even play it? I understand that being done to boss characters, but still. Is the AI so strong it overtakes the player? I don't understand.

There are multiple factors that cause this. As far as I understand, as a character author myself, I can try to explain my perspective.

1 Instead of creating a character to meet boss or market demand and exchange it for money, MUGEN characters are not something you can profit from even somebody willing to pay, its not enough to pay you bills. So why create them?
The only reason an author would put time and effort to exchange nothing, is to entertain themself. The author may not be a skilled player, but they can program AI to fight for them, and this has a lot of advantages. It’s like coding your own Pokémon and battling another author’s Pokémon.

2 Old versions of MUGEN don’t have a way to tell if a character is being controlled by a human or by AI. What does this mean?
If you're a coder, you write:

If human control => I do nothing
If AI control => I do something (like attacking when the opponent is near or far)

But in older versions of MUGEN, there’s no way to tell whether the character is controlled by a human or AI. The workaround to detect whether the character should be controlled by AI took time to activate. So, if you use the workaround that allows both human and AI control, there will be a delay in activating the AI, and the character might lose the round. To avoid this, authors may hard-code the AI to always be on, ensuring there’s no delay and less chance of losing a round.

imagine you put 6 month or years in your own character, only to see he or she is beaten by other player or other character. you won't like the feeling if you are not mentally prepared.

3 Many people still use older versions of MUGEN. Newer versions, like MUGEN 1.0, 1.1, or IKEMEN, officially have a way to determine if a character should be controlled by a human or AI. However, many authors still code in the old way and don’t use the new AILevel feature. This could be because they want backward compatibility or have other reasons.
Last Edit: December 21, 2024, 06:58:31 am by beterhans
Re: Why auto-ai exists?
#4  December 21, 2024, 07:59:00 am
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I heard another reason Auto A.I. is generally a thing some creators do, because of AI tournaments. I heard a large chunk of Japanese creators take AI tournaments very seriously, and I can only assume tournament participating characters have Auto A.I. solely on to make sure they don't sandbag and lose the tournament. I assume those creators simply choose to take the Auto route instead of more complicated simultaneous Hard A.I. and human player systems.
Re: Why auto-ai exists?
#5  December 21, 2024, 09:45:14 am
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I heard another reason Auto A.I. is generally a thing some creators do, because of AI tournaments. I heard a large chunk of Japanese creators take AI tournaments very seriously, and I can only assume tournament participating characters have Auto A.I. solely on to make sure they don't sandbag and lose the tournament. I assume those creators simply choose to take the Auto route instead of more complicated simultaneous Hard A.I. and human player systems.

Yeah, this is correct. 

AI tournaments are very popular with the Japanese community.  As I said earlier, some creators have config files that let you adjust the AI level, toggle AI only/human control and similar settings.  If you're familiar with Holn, his AI patches go the extra mile of letting you set frequencies for specific mechanics that a character might have.  For example, some of his Versus Series patches will perform touch of death or infinite combos if enabled.

If you download an AI patch and find it isn't to your liking for whatever reason, I suggest checking if there are any option or config files, you might be able to tweak it a little bit.
Re: Why auto-ai exists?
#6  December 21, 2024, 12:02:06 pm
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Something that pisses me off is that in some characters (especially those made by japanese creators), there is a stupid auto-ai that prevents me from playing the character. I want to know, what's the purpose of this? What's the point of creating a whole character if you can't even play it? I understand that being done to boss characters, but still. Is the AI so strong it overtakes the player? I don't understand.

As someone who actively collects brutal and cheap AI characters, the thing to understand is that a lot of Japanese (and especially Chinese) creators focus more on the technicals of MUGEN, rather than the playability of characters.

This is often why there are entire channels which do nothing but showcase the destruction these characters can do. Keep in mind, these creators are known for their AI in most cases, and take a lot of pride in finding ways to optimize their characters to be as perfect as they can be.

The tournament scene on that side of the community is wild, especially when it comes to cheapie characters. At the end of the day, AUTO-AI mainly exists because the people that use it, are not creating characters with the goal of them being played, but instead to showcase their technical prowess and understanding of game mechanics and how to exploit them.

Prime examples of this are creations by Kotori, KEYSER, Phoenix Kaiser, 1zjxx, and others. These creators are known for their absolutely devastating AI, often outright breaking the game engine in order to win against other characters which you and I would normally lose against.


That said, most of them can have the AI turned off via a CONFIG file, but then there will be no button inputs coded for the character.