Half-Life - Boid AI Flocking Behavior
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- Опубликовано: 28 окт 2024
- Part of my Half-Life Fact Files series: • Half-Life Fact Files
This entry examines the dynamic flocking behavior of Half-Life's Boids. Read the full Combine OverWiki article here: combineoverwiki...
Credit to Barnz for sourcing the original previews.
For reference purposes:
www.red3d.com/...
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• Stanley & Stella in: B...
Music: Half-Life (Kelly Bailey) - Nepal Monastery
I love how they made this totally advanced AI, and they then said "crap, we don't have any real use for this" and just put it in as background material.
The older I get, the more I believe that Valve's devteam actually weren't interested in making a video game, they just wanted to make a bunch of random software tech like this shit and then threw it all together and a game popped out.
I salute them, there not a punch if cry babies despite the effort they put into it when they deemed it unnecessary they just let it go
@@shingshongshamalama I think the more likely scenario is that they have these primitive programs from their college days and when they got together to form Valve and were searching for ideas to put in their games, they just pull out all of these programs and cram it into a game to see what works.
@Ben Silva
And they are doing it again with Source 2 and VR.
The Artificial life stuff from what I learned was demonstrated at conferences especially Michigan AL life confrences. My dad went and has a video talking about boids and flock among other AL stuff. Even as today the AL communitiy is tiny.
And then Boids are not used outside of one scripted scene...
BlueShit199 hunt down the refund
BlueShit199 Kinda like that trash can in MGS 2
BlueShit199 NO! WHY YO.. WHY YOU EVERYWHERE
BlueShit199 in Sven co op-blue shift are there
Luckily they show up more in black mesa
First the roaches, now this. Jesus Christ, they put so much effort into this game.
Some other fun facts about detail: 1. The leech despite not appearing much in the game and being a background creature actually has 723 lines of AI code, which is more than the AI code of the headcrab. 2. The cockroaches you see in the game have 460 lines of AI code, which is more than the code of the zombie. :) 3. Oh and the boid has more code than every aforementioned creature.
1337er Star Boy Love your pfp dude, is it custom?
@@baronofbahlingen9662 I ask the same
@@PantMal It seems gratuitous, but it makes sense to sink time and effort into flocking behaviour, since it could also be used to power ennemy AI. I don't think they ended up doing that though.
Quite a shame that this AI was made and half of it can't be seen ingame.
Hence the name of the game because only "half" of the "life" can be seen.
The technology is still used today - it's even built into game engines like Unreal and Cryengine out of the box!
A "visual" zoo
Modders can save this.
Only got half a life
Really goes to show how much detail went into this game. I didn't even realize that Boids were named, I thought they were just some random Xen thing.
Tlaloc1 and I thought they were some random crows or birds lol
Especially considering they appear in the game for literally 30 seconds
Its mind blowing, the fact that they actually took the time to give them Ai, xen just became a lot less emptyer to me
They're sort of not. 'Boids' is the generic name for the flocking behaviour AI developed by Craig Reynolds in the mid 80s, the name being short for 'bird-oid object(s)'. You're free to consider that their in universe name as well, but they just got that name from the algorithm itself.
This is the issue though. For all the work they put into it... no one really ever noticed it. It wasn't really useful at all. Now if they did convert into a game mechanic by say... walking across a narrow pathway and shooting the leader of the flock to avoid them from flying into you, then it would have been useful. But as it stood, it was pointless.
That's just how Bostonians pronounce bird.
I can not get that out of my head now, goddamnit
Heheheh, lookaddat fokin boid
eyyy fuggettabout dat boid dere. lookatdees new shoos imwalkinere badda bing badda boom
First time I lost my shit in youtube comments.
ah flocka booooids
The name 'Boid' came from a scene in the '68 film 'The Producers', in which an angry New Yorker landlord complained about the 'Boids' (Birds) On his roof. This makes me laugh way more than it should.
didnt the video showcase an older game or something that had boids have flying paper airplane lookin-polygons ?
KILLTHATFOCKINBOID
Damn boids be shittin on me car
Leanify TV Ur right, cuz i watched that on Dead Meat’s channel on Kill Count, because it was some kind of horror
Your videos on Half Life are also awesome, just wanted to let you know.
12 years of playing this game to death and I now just learned you can kill those flying dudes?
What the hell?! How much time do you have on your hands, Marphy!?
Boids normally cannot be killed, making the later demonstrations here impossible to observe under regular circumstances. I edited the code to make Boids vulnerable to damage for the purposes of this video.
MarphitimusBlackimus Wouldn't OP4 let you do this without code modifying? In that game boids appear in a place where you can still use guns
Boids are still coded to not take any damage in Opposing Force, so you can't shoot them there either.
I'm disappointed they made them invincible, I mean why?
@@xyzzy-dv6te they are ambient mobs
It's staggering when you remember that this game was released in 1998.
*This video is flocking awesome!*
get out..
you may go to the exit sir.
One Sad Furfag why did you even click on the vid in the first place?
One Sad Furfag This was revolutionary when it came out since this was dynamic and not scripted, and it did not take a futuristic computer to do it
I get it
Xen life form are fascinating.
I never suspected such things could be!
This is why black mesa xen is taking so long
They're like - OH SHIT, WHAT WE'VE GOTTEN OURSELVES INTO???? HOW ARE WE GONNA DO THIS????????
Dayz 3O6 Indeed, the atmosphere is really neat
I think I read somewhere that Valve took some inspiration from Expedition by Wayne Barlowe, but I don't know if that's true.
_nature is beautiful_
Goddamn even these shitty flying fish rays in Xen have AI? I didn't even know they had a name. Valve, you madmen.
You and me both dude...
Do you want some other fun facts? 1. The leech despite not appearing much in the game and being a background creature actually has 723 lines of AI code, which is more than the AI code of the headcrab. 2. The cockroaches you see in the game have 460 lines of AI code, which is more than the code of the zombie. :) 3. Oh and the boid has more code than every aforementioned creature.
That's amazing! Too bad some of the AI behavior is broken (Houndeye's sleeping, scientists reacting to smell). Regardless, it's astonishing how much detail they put into the game.
I don't feel they put in so much effort with HL2 and its episodes (except the seagull pooping on your car, of course).
True. Broken stuff here and there. But you will hardly find all this detail in recent games. :P
I haven't searched many stuff about HL2 and its AI, but yeah it just doesn't feel they went for the same amount of HL1's detail. Still great game though. Oh, and let's not forget that HL2 had an amazing physics engine.
As for the HL2, they didn't really have that much time to put this extra neat stuff, well because you know them beta leaks and stuff..
Heh. Those Boids are kinda cute actually.
My inner furry is waking up
i agree
Heh. Nothing personnel
They remind me of these flying things from It Conquered the World.
Pidgeon-bat-weird-4 eyes-thing
Only Half Life has enemies that are capable of reacting to the player's weapons in various ways.. and only appearing when the player doesn't have any weapons at all.
Like?
Yep, that's Valve for ya
@@krowta2062 in haalf life 2 if you spawn a stalker and an unarmed citizen, the citizen remarks" theres no way they're gonna make a stalker out of me!"
I wonder why so much effort was put into their AI if they were only used once in the original game on a map where you have no weapons you agitate their AI.
Maybe valve had a use for them but was cut.
Seems like Xen overall was a bit rushed, dontcha think? Plenty untapped potential for alien atmosphere... The Earth segment shows they knew how to do it.
If the floaters had made it into the game, they probably would've been an enemy that used the flocking AI.
Because valve had these big ideas for complex AI but found that alot of it was impractical for a fast paced shooter where the AI would most likely be killed in 5 seconds anyway.
I think the boids were just an experiment to see what they could do with the engine. Later, since they already had the code, they just put them in somewhere where they wouldn't create gameplay problems.
It could make a good use in an open place (like beginning of Interloper chapter) where you would have a minute or two to just explore your surroundings and observe life forms on Xen. Something like this factory looking place with working and neutral Vortigaunts on second map.
No boid were harmed in this demonstration video.
I mean only 24 of them injured by grenade and misc.
None were harmed, only some boids were fucking killed.
No big deal, aliens life costs less than nothing.
Phirenor
Unless you’re asking the aliens.
The amount of attention to detail in Half Life absolutely astounds me. Valve tried create so much immersion with their AI behavior and nearly nobody even notices.
Not to mention this was in 1998, Why can't any other modern studio create something like this? Does attention to detail even matter to todays videogame corporations?
If this attention to detail was in modern AI scripting, would you really notice it?
Nobody cares about code anymore. Just graphics.
The funny thing is if you didn't cheat, you would have never noticed the AI because of the fact it only appears at the very end where you talk to the gman. You can't even kill them normally to notice the flocking behavior! It really is amazing.
Nearly all the AI in the game Rain World is like this, unscripted and dynamic. There's a GDC video showcasing some examples of the dynamic AI and procedural animation pretty well. Not an easy game to get into for most people, but nevertheless feels like a very lively game.
Ertan Soner
Which is (super) ironic considering the reason for most devs and players wanting to see increasingly more *"realistic"* graphics is well...because *ULTRA REALISTIC IS DA BEST!*
**eats delicious graphics card**
Meanwhile, birds in Half-Life 2:
flies away when you get too close
*shits on your buggy when you're not looking*
They shit, specifically, only, onto your buggy, and nowhere else in the entire world. Even the crane doesn't get cranes.
That’s why I use a grenade Smg to see their little guts fly out
*(angry boid noises)*
( _calm boid noises_ )
Why are there two of the exact same comments right next to each other?
"Killing any members of the flock"
*kills 2/3 of the flock*
*A N I M A L A B U S E*
*flashbacks to cliff racers*
Praise Saint Jiub. Please save us all from the Boids, a menace even greater than the cliff racer scourge.
FLYYYYYYIN
You’re dead.
You’re stuck in the soul cairn.
*Screech!*
The Atomic Cherry Ha, jokes on you! I'm free from the winged menace here!
Who else initially misread it as "bad fucking ai behavior"
NOVA me i swear to god it said fucking
Me
I kept seeing "Bold AI"
"Bad AI fucking behavior"
...woah
Seeing Tacticability say "Bold AI" just caused me to read "Boid AI Flocking Behavior" as "Bold AI Flavor", like it's pringles or something.
Boid AI Flocking Behavior DLC
$0.99 for each one to appear
$5.99 full boid pack with leader
$10.00 working dynamic scripts
"Half-Life Remastered, Only 59.99*
*Optional Season pass + DLC packs another 75.00"
No this game didn't come out in 2016.
Guarantee drops are unacceptable.
Make it random loot tilted towards $100 spending per desirable item on average.
Salutations, and welcome to another Half-Life Fact Files video. This time we're actually covering Half-Life!
I have no additional trivia to offer, but here's a tangentially related short film about a bird who loves a fish: ruclips.net/video/pbFEQv259yw/видео.html
MarphitimusBlackimus It's such a shame that Black Mesa Source doesnt replicate vast majority of these detailed behaviours for AI.
Maybe you could get in touch with the BMS team so they could implement some if this in some way or form in Xen update?
P.S. Does Half-Life Source carry over these ai behaviours or its broken like random tilling feature?
Kacpa2 The original is always best.
MarphitimusBlackimus Thank you for these kind of videos. It makes me love HL games even more. Sadly Valve is not as cool as before.
Btw I suppose that the HL2 birds don’t have this behavior.
great as usual Marph.
Any future plans for different games or nah?
First glance : "Bald AI Fooking Behaviour"
This is definitely k00l, but I can understand why they weren't used more frequently. It would have distracted the player to be walking around Xen and having these random space bats flying around making noises in between deadly enemies.
Having them at the very end of the game, when G-Man is talking to you, makes sense since it gives you something to stare at besides G-Man's sexy face.
Case in point: Ticks from Marathon 2.
*IT NEVER STOPS*
MrBobman878 You're just being paranoid
Man, so underused. I can imagine early in development they were expected to be in Xen levels far more often, but things just didn't pan out for whatever reason. Feels like such a waste.
The chumtoad (which you can google) was another Xen creature that was clearly supposed to be a much bigger deal than it ended up being.
At this point, someone should probably take the Biodome Complex chapter from Opposing Force, make it non-destroyed, and then literally just populate it with Xen creatures so we can watch their otherwise-mostly-undemonstrated AI.
Thanks for the linking, man!
Il est trop cool Marphitimus :p
It’s too bad these creatures didn’t appear more often. Xen really would have benefitted from non-hostile wildlife. Almost every creature wanting to kill you in Xen get’s rather tiring.
gets*
Well Black Mesa is the answer
I've been working on a Half-Life Deathmatch map that takes place in Xen and I've been trying to make them fly along a scripted path in the background. Unfortunately I haven't had much success so far.
I'm pretty sure all npc's are disabled in multiplayer...
Half Way Lambda Well, shit so much for that.
These are the kinds of things you wouldn't like to see during an acid trip.
That would be the Machine Elves. These guys seem chill...
We can't stop here! This is boid country!
You gotta wonder if the two boids are different sexes, species, or different ages. I think they're different species.
@Nan Yue Imagine going through child birth, and it's you.
Maybe a sub-group if the main boid?
But do they move out of the way when you get near them?
if youre noclipping no
Jerome Tolentino It’s a reference to Fish A.I.
I want more 100 ways to die .-.
ok
Jerome Tolentino i mean Penguinfishing
Boids are such interesting creatures, I wish there was more information on them.
That's an incredibly impressive amount of work that goes into an entity that only ever appears twice. (once per game)
Imagine if big name game developers of today put in the same amount of meticulous passion and effort demonstrated here.
Call of Duty Ghosts put that much effort into the fish that appear like once. The actual explaination is that the algorithm is actually pretty simple, it's just fighting actual swarms of enemies arn't that fun (and tends to get graphically intensive). Infact plenty of games that feature fish or birds have a flocking algorithm if they're not a canned animation. This was probably put in either as a test, experiment, or with the intent of adding more use of it later.
Game development was a lot different in the 90s, and Half-Life itself went through a fairly hellish development cycle as a result of work being routinely scrapped. You'd see less titles actually released these days if developers spend weeks just playing with the engine.
man i love thede videos, keep em coming please.
WHO IS A GOOD BOID?
Since they only appear in the scene with Gman does that mean that you never get to hear their angry sound clips in the original Half-Life, so it's exclusive to Opposing Force?
You can't shoot them in that one either.
Now boids got the attention they deserve. They appears a lot more often in Black Mesa. Seeing them flying around Xenian landscape is a sight to be hold.
Angry Boids 3:35 sounds like Star Fox Transmitions on the SNES :P
Amazing video, it's awesome how there are many details I never noticed before.
Had watched through a lot of your videos recently when discovering them through other various Half-Life series based videos I've been watching, and this is yet another example of how awesome a gaming studio Valve once was! There's such incredible attention to detail away back then, like two decades ago at this point, that in itself is just pretty amazing and goes to show how much time was well spent putting these games together, that stuff like this was waaaay ahead of it's time considering what kind of technology they had to work with back then! :o
I would love to see AFlock become a true NPC in Half Life's series one day. They could potentially be a point where players can pick up extra ammo or health pickups, like they just had them on hand and needed a place to put them. I like the idea of them being friendly.
Blueshift has aflock
I love learning about the really intricate stuff put into games that we never notice. Makes me appreciate them so much more.
Not just Half-Life, either, if I remember correctly Metal Gear Solid 2 had a system for ice melting if you shot an ice bucket, which only appeals in one place in the entire game. The ice melted slower if the ice cubes that were expelled from the bucket landed closely to each other. Stuff like that man, all games have these little details that no one would ever notice, but its such a treat to learn about them, it makes the game feel so much more interesting.
I recently learned that walls in cyberspace sections of System Shock are running Conway's Game of Life.
Another flocking good upload from my fave HL Channel
Meet The Flockers.
And yet in breath of the wild, the keese flocks will fly randomly and through floors and shit.
nature is beautiful
So much detail and efford in programing for something on appear one time.
These guys only appear in ONE part and they put this much effort into them. Astounding.
I'm glad you're on this platform,i love classic half life! Thank you so much for showing what we've missed over the years
I'm so glad to see Half-Life Fact Files is still a thing you do. It's fascinating what you manage to dig up and/or point out!
The music goes really good with the boids for some reason.
I found the background music funny :D that instrument (ney) is usually associated with religious stuff in Turkey but there's a flock of aliens here
Semih İşeri nereden bulmuşlar bu müziği acaba?
Still glad you're making these videos
these videos are always so chill
I just watched a video about alien bird from a game that's almost 20 years old
Fast-forward to Skyrim, released on 11/11/11, and dispite numerous patches and the Special Edition... never even properly looped the flight of hawks, noticed most visibly above the docks of Solitude.
This is my new favorite channel to chill to 😊
this is like one of those videogame documentary things but actually informatives
I wonder if they re-used that dynamic flocking AI for anything in the future. Half Life 2's Manhacks possibly?
Marphitimus, thank you! You have inspired me to make many videos, and to put more time and effort into making them. I have been watching your videos for quite a while, and taken some of your other videos for inspiration. Keep it on man, I enjoy these fact files as does everyone else!
This game and this channel always amazes me
Imagine instead of only seeing birds in hl2 u also saw voids flying with the birds
So when Half Life was made the devs made a dynamic adaptive AI for creatures used scarcely in the background, And in 2015 xenomorphs from Aliens Colonial Marines were only able to run in a straight line until you shot them dead. The future is here.
Just found out
1. These things exist
2. EVERYTHING HAS AI
Anyone else feel kinda sad when they get shot?
Ever since I found out about Boids, i have adored every aspect of them
Its bittersweet to see the attention to detail then vs what valve does now
I'm in love with this videos, Half life has been my favourite game ever and It's really great keep discovering things about it even today.
This was actually the thing I wanted to know the most from this series. I always thought the boids were really cool for something that shows up for like 30 seconds in the game
"The alternate AFlock appears once in Blue Shift following Scripted Paths" RANDYYYYYYY!!!!!!
So much detail going into a creature that was only used a handful of times as set decoration. I'm as baffled as I was with the detailed roach AI.
In back mesa the flying alien ship is named mantis what is named in Half-Life
Thought these things were just background low Polly versions of the big sting ray ships
wow, that reminds me of the developer's comment, on the portal, about "doing something that players don't even notice is there, but the detail that gives depth to the environment"
The Squad Leader A.I thing also works with HECU but in a different manner, the Balaclavas and Berets (Named OP4Cigar) are the highest rank in a Squad, they are usually found carrying SPAS-12s, if one or both are killed, the rest of the Squad members are going to panic and will disperse, Leaders also give orders such as flank, fall back, rush in, and throw grenades, Squads are more aggressive when their Leader is alive, and when they kill Freeman, they will come up to Freeman's body and taunt/loot him.
That's quite interesting, never paid attention to those flying things.
Thx for the info.
66 thousand subscribers! :D
Weird that i didn't have notifications on. I've liked your channel for a long time now.
Great stuff. Looking forward to see how/if CC showcase the Boid AI in upcoming Black Mesa: Xen Chapters
It never ceases to amaze me how much work valve put into their game.
I love this channel
"Angry Boid noises"
marphy has blessed us with another fact file
This channel is amazing. Respect !
Interesting how one of the most promoted features of Half-Life turned into a background element that most people probably didn't even notice.
I'm guessing Valve never thought to have the Boids as an enemy. I'd imagine them flying through caves in Xen filled with obstacles, and attacking or going near any Boid will cause them and the rest of that flock to attack you.
Another great video!
Gotta love the Boid's sounds...
Awesome video maphitimus!
Really interesting!
Only marphitimus could make a 5 and a half minute long video on alien birds
I love how the yellow boids looks like the xen manta rays, like assuming they're related in some way
The boids we got have 8 eyes 4 at the top 4 at the bottom
The yellow boys got 6 eyes at the front
They might have just evolved in a simular environment, lived a simular lifestyle and have simular morphology.
Damn, parts of this soundtrack were in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down in the "Besieged" mission as well. Brings back memories.
they are beautiful
Never been attention about AI. But AI In this game is truly demonstrating and interesting.
Alien paper planes
I love the vid and the song. I hear its also used in Delta Force : Black Hawk Down. But, only the middle part is used.
Is funny when you play HL1 you don´t even noticed the impresive AI behavior from the small animals,and someone worked so hard for that.
Another way in which blue shift is inferior.
nooo stop killing those poor boids :(
I just love that they put all this effort into a creature that you only see once and can never interact with.