A co-creator of the original Fallout says he modified his criminally underrated D&D videogame to work with a Department of Defense AI project in 2005
I come to you, PC Gamer reader, hat in hand to report once again that Fallout/Outer Worlds co-creator and Troika Games co-founder, Tim Cain, has said something in a YouTube vlog that blew my damn mind. He's already regaled us with tales of a Lord of the Rings RPG that never was(opens in new tab), "the true purpose of the Vaults in Fallout(opens in new tab)," and the rough plans for a Vampire: the Masquerade — Bloodlines sequel/expansion(opens in new tab) set in Barstow and Vegas. A few days ago, he also dished(opens in new tab) on helping train a US Department of Defense AI to play grognard holy grail and "The Most D&D(opens in new tab)" D&D game, The Temple of Elemental Evil(opens in new tab).
According to Cain, in 2004 he was approached by a former graduate school classmate who had moved on to working for the DoD. «He wanted to know if I could take Temple of Elemental Evil and write an API (a programming interface) so that an external AI could run the game,» Cain explains in the video.
The contract paid for Cain and ToEE's original lead programmer, Steven Moret, to produce this version of ToEE in the waning days of Vampire: the Masquerade — Bloodlines' development. Cain says that they never actually witnessed the DoD's AI first hand—he and Moret would work on the compatible version of ToEE, ship it off, then receive notes from their client to adjust it. «We made it so that an external program could control the basic functions of Temple of Elemental Evil,» Cain elaborates.
In order to test their API in-house, Cain and Moret made a simple AI that largely made choices at random, with positive reinforcement from gaining XP, and negative reinforcement from character death. In the video, Cain recounts an anecdote of even
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