Recent Posts

I still have to work on the DD/DOM team orders, they're not properly implemented. (And some special changes have to be done for those modes, not sure how I would handle the menu in DOM but UT2004 had "Attack Point A" and "Attack Point B" instead of "Attack" and "Defend").

I'm at the phone right now... IIRC in DD "roam" was interpreted by bots as something like "choose yourself the A/B point you wish to attack", which may fit. Maybe adding a more descriptive alias for the command, such as "attack/do at will"?
Maybe in Dom "roam" may do the same ("choose yourself a dom point to attack")?
In case you also plan to add the ability to give specific orders about which exact Dom point to attack, there is the problem that their number and their names may vary... so one should make the orders menu "dynamic" to read the point names from the map... or should name them "first one, second one, third one..." following the order they are listed in upper right corner, which may nor be optimal.
Maybe one could instead just add "attack" (attack neutral and enemy points) and "defend" (roam between the points of our team, or only around one of them), in addition to "roam" (choose yourself)....

JUST BRAINSTORMING...

I still have to work on the DD/DOM team orders, they're not properly implemented. (And some special changes have to be done for those modes, not sure how I would handle the menu in DOM but UT2004 had "Attack Point A" and "Attack Point B" instead of "Attack" and "Defend").

[Things I noticed:]

First bit of feedback.
Scenery:
- I tried on OACMPDM10, that I know has the aas compiled with grapplereach option.
- I set bot_grapple 1
- I was often using g_grapple to give the grapple to all users (note: after you enable/disable it, the grapple is given/removed to the player on respawn).
- I was using bots at skill 4, because at skill 3 and lower in their personality files ([botname]_c.c) CHARACTERISTIC_GRAPPLE_USER is set to 0.5 instead of 1.0, I suppose meaning they are less interested into using the grapple. Exception being Liz that for lower skill levels has it set to 0.1!
- I often played in TDM mode, ordering them to "follow me", to see if they used the grapple to reach me.

Things I noticed:
- It looks like they do not try anymore to use it if they do not have it. Good.
- It looks like they do not shoot at the same spot over and over again aborting it before starting to be pulled. But I would need more tests, as for the moment I only found one place where they would actually use it to follow me.
- It looks like if I go in places they cannot reach also by standard means, they will no go there anyway not even with the hook (on the roof of the BFG building).
- The only place of that map for now I found they use the grapple to follow me is inside the warehouse, going from the lower floor to the stairs near to the crates. Sometimes they succeed, but unfortunately more often they bump against the stairs and fall down, then try again (and they may fail again or succeed). I should mention that those specific stairs give some issue to bots in general, at times they jump down from the stairs instead of reaching the Dom point a few units in front of them. So it would be good to find some more places where to try the grapple.
- I'm not sure if bots do have any interest into picking grappling hook up, even in case they don't have it already. I brought five bots following me very near to the grapple spawn point, then ordered them to "roam" and they scattered without anybody of them taking the hook.
- I had to do the tests in TDM mode because I noticed that in Domination and Double Domination (maybe also other modes, but I haven't tried others today) bots do not reply correctly to some team orders. They do "report" correctly, and accept correctly the "dominate A/B" commands in DD, but they do ignore completely the "follow me" and "camp here" commands, they do not even reply to the chat in Dom, or reply with "I'll dominate point A/B" to a "follow me" order in DD! (Reminder, bots listen to team orders only using "team chat", not public chat).
- Bots do not seem to move when they have the "flight" item (which sometimes spawns in the warehouse)!

PS: It would be useful, for testing purposes, to at least temporarily have a way to "pimp up" the "will" of bots to actually use the grapple. It looks like they use it very rarely, even if they are at skill 4.... so it's hard to observe their behavior...

That last bit corresponds to a bot's defined self preservation value IIRC.


My curiosity about the bot code is about that interbreed/script generating stuff that was gutted out of the bot library altogether.  There's probably some of that in gladiator but i didn't check that either.  Unfortunately any questions I might have will never be answered as Mr. Elusive passed away some years ago.


If I go to edit the AI though it'd be for 'cosmetic' reasons, like giving more personality potential (i.e. specific character reactions, love/hate relationships) to flesh out the cast more...

One thing I've noticed is how the bots don't like to simply jump down to a lower level, they always walk to the edge, look down and slowly walk off the edge.  It is very unhuman like, and makes the vulnerable to attack while doing this.

The other main thing that bugs me is that the bots will engage you in battle while their health is high, but get a rocket hit on them (or whatever) and suddenly they are running away to get some health.  I get the logic behind it, but I think humans are more likely to try to finish off their opponent before going to heal up.

[Here's a test pk3]

AI is a vital to most games as a key mechanic for providing challenging and interesting situations and choices for players. Sometimes AI implementations unnecessarily try to address features that don't improve the experience, and often AI implementations fail to make the game as interesting and challenging for the player as they should have. By challenging, I don't mean hard, but rather engaging and though provoking, and not easily exploitable.

In terms of implementation, rather than provide a laundry list of features like path finding, obstacle avoidance, etc., I think it's more important to consider how the player will perceive the AI. The number one requirement for good AI is to never (or at least almost never) look stupid. Players will much more readily notice (and judge AI based on) recurrent examples of brain dead behavior, rather than occurrences of brilliant tactics. Certainly, players appreciate smart, unexpected, and emergent behavior, but only if it's reasonably obvious what's happening. To this end, it's vital that your NPCs provide a lot of feedback about what they are thinking and doing through speech and animation.

The AI needs to understand the rules, strategy, and tactics of the game as well as a player of similar skill level would. It needs to have a knowledge model about the game world and game state that is similar in limitations to what a player would know. For FPS games, it's also very important for the AI to have a human-like aiming model, with the same kinds of strengths and weaknesses in hitting targets under various conditions that would affect a human player.

[The challenge is] successfully implementing all the features and capabilities I've described. One important factor is prioritizing AI sufficiently, and early enough in the project, in the face of many other issues and features that are more immediate needs during the development of the game. It's also important to consider the AI implementation for the design of any game features with which the AI will interact. Many games seem to have AI whose development was rushed or tacked on late in development.

Some areas of the bot AI in OA needed to be polished and perfected. I've been working on several areas of the code for quite some time, but there's still a lot of work to be done. These two days that have passed, I've been working almost exclusively on the AI. Here's a test pk3, up to commit d0cc77c.

Things that need to be tested:

• Domination (general behavior)
• Possession (general behavior)
• Rocket jumping behavior
• Grappling hook behavior
• Just in case there are problems, 1FCTF behavior

To do:

• The problem reported by Sub-Zero in Discord, regarding the bots not using MG in long distances. I think I've found the culprit, but I need to be sure.

I'll be tackling the following:
- DM-Oblivion (shell is in the repository)
- DOM-Condemned (as a DM map)
- DM-Liandri
Just to balance, if I can't make Liandri in time, I'll pick q3dm16 instead.

EightMegs/ToyotafanKK is tackling q3ctf1 using a shell I've started. Can't wait to see what he did. Not sure if he's also going to do another map.

carca55gr1nd3r has q3tourney2.

Considering my current mapping skills with Trenchbroom, I could possibly do:

AS-HiSpeed
CTF-LavaGiant
DM-Healpod][
DM-Pyramid

I've been cleaning up my Dropbox account and forgot to add the newest link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ooy8mjjqstvi7ym/z_oac_czest2-a4v2.pk3?dl=0

Can I say that the upper level still feels a bit "empty" of bonuses?

PS: What about adding DOM support?

I'll check that later. Not sure about adding DOM. To me it seems too linear. An alternative would be to add dom startpoints (would require the newer gamecode packs) to the spawnrooms.

Also adding for the next version a change from the recent oac_sago2: removing regular team spawnpoints from the spawnrooms.

Another suggestion I had from another player would be to also add an option to show your computer time (yes, the clock) on screen.

I suppose the rationale is that if you are playing fullscreen, you don't see your own PC clock, so you may risk to be late for sleeping, going office or school...

I don't know if it would be worth the time to code it or the use of a new cvar (cg_drawClock 1 for 24h mode, cg_drawClock 2 for 12h mode? Vice versa?)... however I write it down here, just in case someone may be interested into trying to code it.

In the meanwhile, I can just suggest people to take a look to their wristwatch or to their phone by now and then, between matches!