User talk:Nonickch
Hello, I'll be doing things here and there with the AI. For personal and 3rd party reference, I'm keeping my todo list here:
- Finetune GUETE values -Made initial checks, need people to test some values and tell me what they think of the changes in behaviour (Set src/game/g_ai.h #defs for GUETE_HIDE to 30 and GUETE_CIV_FACTOR to 0.15. Do not change GUETE_HIDE if you're working on development trunk). Try and fiddle with the values in the 10% range and see if you get a better experience. Please make a large enough set of games (prefferably while playing the campaign) in order to have a more complete and map-independent view. --Work in progress
- Dodon's patch made aliens too agressive. Tone down via possibly making them evaluage visible threats better (AI_HideNeeded)
- Switch&test CLOSE_IN bonus to use pathing distance instead of absolute distance.
- Try and find the 'aliens shoot through walls' bug
- Get aliens to shoot prone if it needs be.
- Switch GUETE bonuses to multiplicative and observe the new behavior, re-tune GUETE's
- Grenade/knife throwing from inventory and indirect fire shots.
Current work
Fixing/augmenting damage estimation of the AI via using the g_combat.c/G_* shooting functions, CL_GetHitPercentage, aswell as the AI_HideNeeded. The performance penalty of the G_Shoot* functions is to too great, but are currently the only viable ways of estimating splash and gravity-based weapons. The attempt is to use G_Shoot* for those weapons and an improved version of CL_GetHitPercentage for the rest. Optimal future solution is to work solely from the math of hitpercentages.
These will *probably* fix the following:
- Aliens properly evaluate the possible outcome of their shots. That does include splash damage from all weapons.
- aliens can apply indirect fire properly. Best case scenario: they can throw grenades above obstacles. As it is right now they think grenades move in a straight line. Timed grenadelauncher shots are possible, but currently not checked vs open space in order to get the extra range via bounce.
- aliens will stop being so suicidal since they know when they can get easily killed the next turn
- Aliens might be able to employ med-packs
- An overall balance between aggression and hiding, provided the GUETE_HIDE is fine-tuned again
- Aliens are aware of the difficulty level and their bonuses because of it (extra dmg)
- Possibly solve the aliens-shoot-walls issue (LOF properly calculated and G_IsVisibleForTeam dropped for LOS calculations because it uses the vismasks)
- Pave the way for grenade/knife-from-backpack throwing support
- Aliens can shoot on different z-levels of the target (does it make any difference???).
- Overall encounter difficulty will go way up (pending GUETE optimization)
As you can see there's a whole lot of things that stand to be gained from this, thus I'm taking my sweet time.
Unfortunately, this will also mean that the aliens tap into their god-o-vision a little more.