Development > Coding

the AI discussion

<< < (2/19) > >>

Hertzila:

--- Quote from: nonickch on June 29, 2010, 02:39:17 pm ---Indirect fire seems to be totally out of the picture in the current AI. Grenades are a todo in a place where it shouldn't be that hard, but that's only for visible targets. Lobbing grenades above fences is not the same though since the AI does not consider targets that are not visible to the current actor. Finally, there's the part about calculating splash damage, since the hit percentage of a nade is small, yet the damage cause is still way above significant. Given the TU's needed to fire alien weapons, and a working grnade tossing AI, I wouldn't be surprised if they would insist on chucking all their grenades at the first opportunity (I'd laugh so hard if this happens, half your squad gone on round one in the close-quarter spawns).

--- End quote ---

This nearly happened to me once: 6 aliens, all who had only grenades as weapons (one had kerrblade but that's it). I had a laserguy on RF some distance away from the door, crouching. In their turn, every single one of them just walked out of the door and lobbed a grenade at that guy. I had my men behind the corner too so one bad bounce and nearly all my agents would be dead. Luckily, since they are just as good throwers as your agents (that is, even worse than an armless guy), the grenades missed by a good margin, no one turned up dead and only one guy suffered damage. My next turn was storming their "safehouse" where all of them were neatly packed in one corner.

Mattn:

--- Quote from: nonickch on June 29, 2010, 02:39:17 pm ---Since people tend to skim the first few lines, some requests first:
* Right now I'm just fiddling with the #defs in g_ai.h, (the GUETE ones). Anyone can whip up a quick way so I could tinker with them from something like the console? I see some set commands in there, so I guess if I could use that functionality and replace all the uses of the GUETE defs in the g_ai.c? Things would go a lot faster as atm I'm just recompiling for each tested value :/
Help appreciated with some playtesting. I'm always on irc and typing my name there bleeps my client (I'm on GMT+2 tz)

--- End quote ---

make cvars out of them.

arakis:
if this is a squad based game, how come the ai  is hamperd with every alien is for himself? I think it should be a priority to rehaul the ai so it thinks like a player, one entety controling all aliens and geting inputs from all aliens.  MO only, should not be  taken to seriusy

Duke:
@nonickch:
First off, welcome to these forums :)

Secondly, kudos for your (almost)precise analysis of what the AI code does. It took me much longer to figure that out. And thanks for writing it down ;)

1. Would you mind to transform your first post into a wiki article about the 'as-is AI' ? Somewhere in the vicinity of the BSP and pathfinding articles would be suitable imho.

2. Fiddling with the GUETE_* values is fine. I bet you can heavily influence the AI behaviour. But imho those values should NOT be made cvars unless restricted to debug mode (think: bug reports!).

3. Imho LUA is NOT the way to go yet. AI mostly has a performance problem. LUA will certainly not speed up AI.

4. We should define a limit for the duration of the alien turn on a contemporary machine. Afaik this has not been done yet. I'd suggest 2 min.

5. Having #4 in mind, a two-turn look-ahead is currently not really doable. btw to get the crew out of the harvester cockpit, you'd need a three- or four-turn look-ahead !

6. Sure enough I'd like to see a team-behaviour. Do you happen to know about any concepts for that ?

7. Always keep in mind that it doesn't help us to have a perfect (slow) AI that forces us to downgrade the firepower of the aliens. What we want is playabilty without too much NS (=natural stupidity, pun intended).

Imho your analysis of the AI code justifies immediate commit access to the svn, but that's up to Mattn (the rule is: send a patch that we accept).
Also let me express the wish to make a person with your skills a *permanent* member of the UFO dev team (provided you keep on discussing before committing).
I know AI is every programmer's darling, but there are several even more important places where your skill could help...

Mattn:
@Duke: Keep in mind that the game frame (and thus the ai frame) is threaded now - the ui would not interrupt when the ai round is running.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page