Classic Forces Enemy Ai Vs Generations Classic Enemy Ai.

[Badnik Mechanic]

I was watching the footage of the Casino Forest stage again and I noticed that there is only one enemy in the entire stage, it's on the other side of a wall, but in terms of proximity it's still very close, yet it doesn't react to Sonic in any way, it's just standing there.

This is good.

This means that the enemy likely won't react to Sonic unless the enemy can actually see him. It's not done via a 360 degree proximity around the centre of the enemy. This means a player can think tactically when dealing with them.

So I decided to go back to the only other Classic stage we have footage for, Green Hill, to see if there were any additional signs of enemy behaviour. Well... there is, and it's really strange. The enemies in Classic Green Hill appear to be in some cases completely lacking or have completely broken/barely functional Ai/Player detection.

Not going to highlight the fish since they're on a loop, and I think that the Buzzbombers are also on a different kind of behaviour trigger (will explain more of this at the end).

Take a look at this video footage. 

At 0:03 seconds, Sonic jumps, and strikes the motobug... and it doesn't react... it's just sat there. The motobug isn't moving at all, it's just standing there... why? Isn't there normally movement on these badniks when they're on the 2D plane?

Skip ahead to 0:13 seconds, another motobug and again it doesn't react, only this one doesn't even react when Sonic gets close to it.

Then at 0:18 seconds we get our third motobug, it finally reacts... But just look how close Sonic has to get to it before it does that, you're virtually standing right next to it. This is the first instance in this stage where we clearly see the motobug's Ai react to Sonic's presence, and it's not a big distance... in fact it's really short.

Now take this into account...

None of the Motobugs shown so far have motion... They are just standing there doing nothing other than an idle animation. 

The next enemy, the Egg Pawn, at 0:33, Sonic gets close to it on a moving platform... even his Y Axis crosses over the path of the Egg Pawn... and it does nothing... it literally just stands there... even when Sonic jumps at it, it doesn't react 

This is a screengrab taken... well look at it... Sonic has passed the centre mass of the enemy, and it's still not reacted. The next frame is probably when the hit detection will trigger and the enemy explodes.... but again... no reaction and utterly no movement.

Now lets look at the next enemy, another egg pawn. And this one does react to Sonic, you can see a few frames of the enemy lifting it's arm... but look at how close Sonic has to be to the enemy to trigger this movement.

That's the proximity before the enemy detects Sonic...

At 0:55 we get another two motobugs, this one is hard to get a good look at because the player uses the spin attack... but these enemy's are actually moving, it's slow movement, but they've not detected Sonic like we saw that earlier motobug do.

This close, no change in animation, the enemy doesn't detect Sonic is even there. But we've seen earlier that these enemies do have Ai to detect Sonic from the stationary motobug which was able to do it.

Later on in the stage the player falls into this section... the enemy reacts... but look at the distance, it's much further than every other enemy seen so far. 

 The second enemy also has an increase in detection range, but it's the distance of the enemy in front of it. 

1:21, another enemy which does utterly nothing. But immediately after we have another two enemies of the same type, these ones behave similar to the row of 3 encountered earlier, same detection distance and same reaction.

Then we finish the level.

Now I didn't include the fish enemies for two reasons. 

• They attack via a loop, they will always jump at a set tick of the clock, 
• The only time this changes is the final section which is scripted based on the players location on the bridge.

I also didn't include the Buzzbombers because based on the video, it appears that they work on a type of proximity, when the player enters a specific part of the level, they activate, fly a specific distance into the frame, then perform their attack. This might be based on proximity to Sonic, but it's difficult to tell since the player doesn't ever stop.

Now I know what some people are going to say "It's too early to tell", "It's just a demo!" or "It's always been like that!" Even I wondered "Was the enemy behaviour always this way?"

Well... I decided to go back to Sonic Generations, fortunately this game had a demo which was released for it, whilst YouTube is full of speed runners which makes it hard to observe the enemy behaviour in this demo, fortunately there are some examples which help illustrate my points.

This is the PS3 demo for Sonic Generations, it was released a around June 23rd, Which was between 4-5 months before Generations came out.

Despite the poor quality of the video, you can see a number of things about the enemy Ai.

The motobugs are always moving, they have a patrol zone, they also react to Sonic much sooner, based on proximity, but it's there. In fact later on in the video we see a motobug moving away from Sonic, it doesn't react because it can't see him, suggesting there is a line of sight rule on them.

Crabmeats are also more aggressive and present a much greater challenge, they react the moment they enter the frame, their attack animation is a long one, but they will attack, not just stand idle.

Now the buzzbombers are different, some just follow a path/patrol route since they're used as a gameplay device to allow the player to reach a higher path. But that said, the yellow buzzbomber later in the stage will attack you if you take too long to perform the jump to the higher platform.

 

Eitherway, there is a clear difference in enemy Ai and design. 

In Generations, the enemies present much more of a challenge, they react much sooner to the player, they fire their weaponry much sooner and actually move around the level, even if it's just a short patrol route.

Whereas Forces' enemies are much more docile. Egg pawns do not move, only a few standing in a row even bother to react to you. Others, they react but only when the player is practically pixels away from them, they clearly have some Ai/player detection, but it's so short it's completely pointless.

Motobugs also seem to have an issue, they just sit there, despite how in Generations even the first motobugs in that game did move around, detect the player and perform an attack.

 

So what's going on here? We have several enemies which are clearly the same type, but are either completely lacking or in some cases have utterly butchered player detection so their response routine is triggered far to late for them to present a threat to the player, only a tiny sample of enemies in this stage appear to behave in a manner which seems correct. Whereas in the Generations demo, they all appear to behave universally aside from ones which are there for platform progression.

We can debate if this behaviour is actually challenging to the player or not. But what seems to be more interesting from a gameplay perspective, Generations enemies? Or Forces? Because I based on what I'm seeing here, the enemies in Generations' demo are behaving much better and smarter than the ones in Forces.

[Soniman]

Uhh to me the Forces motobogs are clearly moving before you kill them, at the very least they're not standing still, they just die so fast they barely have time to react to anything, makes sense I guess, not like Motobugs are the most complex enemies in the series, literraly the equivalent to the Goomba

[Waveshocker Sigma]

Huh, so I'm NOT losing my mind. It always looked like the enemies just weren't doing anything in the videos but no one else mentioned it so I thought maybe I just imagined it or was looking too hard.

I have nothing else to comment on for this. That's just plain lame. What's the point of an enemy if it doesn't hit me and piss me off?

HIT ME, DAMMIT!

[Badnik Mechanic]

1 minute ago, Soniman said:

Uhh to me the Forces motobogs are clearly moving before you kill them, at the very least they're not standing still, they just die so fast they barely have time to react to anything, makes sense I guess, not like Motobugs are the most complex enemies in the series, literraly the equivalent to the Goomba

They're not, they're definitely not. 

You can tell from the first one, it's even sat in a small dip and is on a light green strip of grass and never moves from this spot. The camera movement which tracks Sonic gives it a sense of movement, but it definitely doesn't move aside from an idle animation. The second one is the same... pause the video the moment it enters into frame... check out the colour of the grass and then pause it just before Sonic destroys it, it never moves.

The only ones which I've seen move are the ones I identified in the post.

[Wraith]

22 minutes ago, Waveshocker Sigma said:

Huh, so I'm NOT losing my mind. It always looked like the enemies just weren't doing anything in the videos but no one else mentioned it so I thought maybe I just imagined it or was looking too hard.

I have nothing else to comment on for this. That's just plain lame. What's the point of an enemy if it doesn't hit me and piss me off?

HIT ME, DAMMIT!

I mean, I'm kind of used to modern Sonic enemies not doing anything so I thought they were just bein themselves.

Not even trying to be a smart ass either. Sonic usually kills enemies before they can process he's there in these games so it hasn't registered to me that they were doing nothing.

[Waveshocker Sigma]

1 minute ago, Josh said:

I mean, I'm kind of used to modern Sonic enemies not doing anything so I thought they were just bein themselves.

Not even trying to be a smart ass either. Sonic usually kills enemies before they can process he's there in these games so it hasn't registered to me that they were doing nothing.

Well yeah, but that's Modern games. I expect that to be the case since I play those to feel like an overpowered badass that just plows through everything with careful precision.

Except in Lost World. Lost World enemies are a pain.

[Badnik Mechanic]

1 minute ago, Josh said:

I mean, I'm kind of used to modern Sonic enemies not doing anything so I thought they were just bein themselves.

Not even trying to be a smart ass either. Sonic usually kills enemies before they can process he's there in these games so it hasn't registered to me that they were doing nothing.

Not checked the 2D view but just had a look at the initial section of Sunset Heights for Modern Sonic, was curious about the Egg Pawns.

For the modern stages, the Egg Pawns have better Ai than the classic stage counter parts, all the enemies react under the same conditions, the Egg Pawns do indeed raise their weapons when the player gets within a specific distance to them, every single one.

There's no movement around the stage, but reaction behaviour based on proximity is there. It also appears that they operate on line of sight, it's virtually the same Ai behaviour as the Classic stage modes, only it's constant.

[Milo]

Speaking of Lost World, enemy AI (regarding 2D gameplay) was also better in that gameas well. Check Windy Hill Act 2, most of the badniks react to Sonic when he's in close proximity.

 

[Blue Wisp]

I'm not really surprised, the danger from Modern gameplay usually came from the stage itself rather than the badniks. 

8 minutes ago, Waveshocker Sigma said:

Except in Lost World. Lost World enemies are a pain

Fuck these guys.

[Dr. Mechano]

49 minutes ago, Waveshocker Sigma said:

Well yeah, but that's Modern games. I expect that to be the case since I play those to feel like an overpowered badass that just plows through everything with careful precision.

Except in Lost World. Lost World enemies are a pain.

With all due respect... what's the point of that, from a gameplay perspective? I mean, where's the challenge if enemies are a total non-issue?

[StaticMania]

Enemies aren't the only obstacles...

It's still a problem, but challenge isn't completely gone if enemies are a joke, just to say.

[Waveshocker Sigma]

18 minutes ago, Dr. Mechano said:

With all due respect... what's the point of that, from a gameplay perspective? I mean, where's the challenge if enemies are a total non-issue?

Clearing the stages with perfect precision to get the fastest times possible is the true challenge and all that I care about for those games.

Other than that, I'm not really looking for a challenge at all. Some of us don't need things to be super challenging to be fun. <3

I expect different things from different games, after all. Like, if I want an action game that's just mindless fun with no real challenge, I play a Warriors game. When I want to be tested and constantly pull my hair out, I start a Level 1 Critical Mode Run of a Kingdom Hearts game.

[Sega DogTagz]

This is something I've noticed in some of the Avatar footage as well, however I think its less of a chink in the distance/AI recognition and more of an entirely too generous lag time between AI recognition and enemy actually taking action.

For the most part, the Egg Pawn knock offs seem to track Sonic no problem, but the lag time between recognition and reaction is almost an entire quarter second. When Classic is in motion, that is enough time to obliterate an Eggpawn before he can even ready his gun, let alone charge it. When Sonic enters an area with no momentum (such as when he falls directly down into a baddie pit in that GHZ footage), the Pawns have enough screentime to react accordingly.

 

I suspect this lag time is intentional, but morseo for the Avatar. The lag provides ample opportunity for your CaC to "strike" first with his equipped wispon, and sets an inherent delay for retaliatory action by badnik enemies. It creates a second worth of safe zone that a user can capitalize on. Its actually the reason why in the early goings we saw so many noob Avatar players tacking cheap damage when they engaged enemies in a row with a homing attack, followed up with a wispon strike. By the time they realized that the wispon would be a better option than the repeated homing strikes, badniks in the row ahead had a second and a half to ready a murderous volley. Blammo

 

While Modern Sonic enemy's seem to have their own AI rule set (they have to react much, MUCH faster after all) Classic's seem to be copy pasted from the Avatar levels, which is a mistake considering half of them are met at speed. Unless we get some quick-draw models later in the game, these badniks simply can't react fast enough to be a worthwhile challenge without the aid of some cleaver level design. If these are the canon fodder enemies of the first few levels, then its no big deal. If these are the blokes that populate the entire game, then we may have another problem to contend with.

[PKGaming]

1 hour ago, Dr. Mechano said:

With all due respect... what's the point of that, from a gameplay perspective? I mean, where's the challenge if enemies are a total non-issue?

Usually what kills me in a Boost game (Generations to be specific), are bottomless pits. Like if I jumped or mid-air dashed at a bad time or boosted in a bad place and fall off the stage. Enemies are just there to either slow you down or take away all the rings you've been collecting, both of which affect your score. They'll never actually kill you though, unless you're really really bad.

[Blue Blood]

The enemies in Unleashed, Colours,Generations and Forces all  suffer from having incredibly long wind-up animations, making them unlikely to ever reach the point of actually attacking you. More often than not, any projectile that they eventually shoot will move really slowly too. I think the only enemies that pose a threat or challenge in Generations are the spanner-throwing Egg Pawns in Planet Wisp. It shouldn't take 2-5 seconds for an enemy to attack; they should react almost instantly. Lost World actually did a fantastic job using enemies as obstacles that a had to be approached differently, because they reacted swiftly to Sonic and in different ways. None of them were particularly difficult, which isn't want to want from a Sonic game, but they were mini-challenges of their own. You had to react to the enemies just as they react to you. 

Just for clarity, when I say "challenge" I don't mean anything that's particularly difficult. I don't want enemies to be too difficult or pace-breaking either. But I do want them to take a brief bit of thought to tackle. In Forces, it's just boost and homing attack for Modern, spam Wisps for Avatar, and jump on non-reacting obstacles as Classic. Lost World's enemies do so much more, and and many of them required a bit of smart timing. 

When I rag on about Sonic Team and poor game design, this is one of the things that's always on my mind. Enemies that barely do anything is not good game design.

[KHCast]

You'd think Eggman would build enemies built around Sonic and his speed lol. 

Cant believe I'm saying this, but I envy how reactive and smart the Gaia enemies and night egg robot enemies were in Unleashed. Was, quite literally, night and day between the night and day levels, when looking at the ai.

[Dr. Mechano]

12 hours ago, KHCast said:

You'd think Eggman would build enemies built around Sonic and his speed lol. 

Heck, he did in the very first game.

Rollers were fast, and mimicked Sonic's own ability to quickly roll down sloped surfaces. They were a legitimate challenge without being cheap. Beating out Silver Sonic and Metal Sonic, Rollers are arguably the first Badnik meant to directly mirror Sonic's abilities, and they remain a highly memorable enemy because of it.

[StaticMania]

Enemies typically reacted relatively fast in the early games even if they weren't built around matching Sonic's speed...and even if they didn't, they were designed like traps and stuff.

 

If you didn't have torpedo enemies, roller enemies, Egg-Robos, or Slicers...then you had fake spikes, chameleon enemies, or the various designs of Orbinauts.

[Blue Blood]

24 minutes ago, Dr. Mechano said:

Heck, he did in the very first game.

Rollers were fast, and mimicked Sonic's own ability to quickly roll down sloped surfaces. They were a legitimate challenge without being cheap. Beating out Silver Sonic and Metal Sonic, Rollers are arguably the first Badnik meant to directly mirror Sonic's abilities, and they remain a highly memorable enemy because of it.

About that...

 

The Do's and Don'ts of Sonic Enemy AI, Design and Placement in 2017

Do:

Don't:

[Dr. Detective]

19 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

The enemies in Unleashed, Colours,Generations and Forces all  suffer from having incredibly long wind-up animations, making them unlikely to ever reach the point of actually attacking you. More often than not, any projectile that they eventually shoot will move really slowly too. I think the only enemies that pose a threat or challenge in Generations are the spanner-throwing Egg Pawns in Planet Wisp. It shouldn't take 2-5 seconds for an enemy to attack; they should react almost instantly. Lost World actually did a fantastic job using enemies as obstacles that a had to be approached differently, because they reacted swiftly to Sonic and in different ways. None of them were particularly difficult, which isn't want to want from a Sonic game, but they were mini-challenges of their own. You had to react to the enemies just as they react to you. 

Just for clarity, when I say "challenge" I don't mean anything that's particularly difficult. I don't want enemies to be too difficult or pace-breaking either. But I do want them to take a brief bit of thought to tackle. In Forces, it's just boost and homing attack for Modern, spam Wisps for Avatar, and jump on non-reacting obstacles as Classic. Lost World's enemies do so much more, and and many of them required a bit of smart timing. 

When I rag on about Sonic Team and poor game design, this is one of the things that's always on my mind. Enemies that barely do anything is not good game design.

You know, it's weird. You're absolutely right when it comes to the Lost World enemies versus the ones from all those other games. Yet, for some reason I actually remember being more annoyed by it in Lost World. For some reason I remember taking out enemies always feeling satisfying when playing Unleashed or Generations. Probably because of the really primitive side of me that really does just love plowing through them and watching them bounce across the screen when I boost into them. I remember the very first time I saw that happen in Apotos and it gave me such a thrill. And it hasn't really worn off just yet despite being totally okay with the idea of abandoning the boost formula should they go back to something better.

I have four games with it, I'm alright not getting anymore. Perhaps there's a way they can do what you ask for in a way that feels satisfying to me. Lost World didn't for me but I feel like that may just be choked up to the fact that attacking any enemy in that game felt like a chore. Literally just pressing the button to do a homing attack held little satisfaction. I don't know if it's because of how less bombastic it was or what. I only really remember feeling good when I'd hit a bunch of enemies in a row like in the Honeycomb Highway level. 

[Dr. Mechano]

See, to me, it feels less like I'm a super powerful cool guy plowing through enemies... and more like the game is seriously patronizing me and giving me some easy wins to make me feel better.

Taking out a bunch of enemies only feels like an accomplishment if those enemies pose even the remotest of threats, and dispatching them requires at least a little skill.

Aside from just pure aesthetics, this is what made the Badniks memorable and the current generic sentry bots (which are basically Egg Pawns with less personality) not.

[Sean]

One of the things I really liked a lot about Lost World was how enemies posed a challenge and there were different methods of dispatching each one. Unfortunately they weren't always intuitive about it and chances are you'll be going through a lot of trial and error before you figure out how to defeat something. That's not usually the case in the classic games.

[Soniman]

12 minutes ago, Sean said:

One of the things I really liked a lot about Lost World was how enemies posed a challenge and there were different methods of dispatching each one. Unfortunately they weren't always intuitive about it and chances are you'll be going through a lot of trial and error before you figure out how to defeat something. That's not usually the case in the classic games.

I still think SLW had ht eright idea in most cases, and in other cases you have this

Disgusting

[Blue Blood]

@Soniman I assume you're talking about some enemies only being weak to the kick and would damage you if you hit them with a spindash or homing attack? And visa-versa in some cases? Yeah. That seriously undermined the otherwise good enemies in the game. You just had absolutely no way of knowing what was going to happen. 

[StaticMania]

With those enemies in that picture, I think the point is that they're actually pace breaking...because you're forced to deal with multiple of them and only one way.