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Hawk Firestorm

Design flaws/problems

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There are I think several large design flaws as is now.

Firstly the Island enviroments themselves, who ever did them did a nice job.

However they didn't do it with any idea of getting a AI to move a group of vehicals around in them, they are too small have too much impassible terrain, too many high mountains to obstruct air units, and very narrow paths completely unsuitable for a ai to be able to manage well.

The Islands need to be bigger, with more passable terrain and if there are to be valleys they need to be much wider to accommodate the ai moving and fighting with a group of vehicals in them.

I'm sure the guy programming the AI routines would like to throttle him/her. :)

Also related to this is the design of the vehicals themselves, walrus's need to be tracked vehicals not wheeled.

Tracked vehicals can pivot on the spot, they are easier for AI and the user to control, especially in tight places they need to be changed I think.

The carrier itself also needs some changes too I beleive in favour of the AI, that being the docking bay for walrus's should be at the stern of the ship as per the orginal game.

There's many good reasons to do this as it's alot easier to handle and the carrier can deploy/recover on the move as per the orginal game, and it's far less prone to collision and AI docking problems because of the ships hull.

The Mantas I think should have a pivoting front turret that can track a target like a Helo gunship independant of the hulls movement, rather then the clucky see saw thing with weps being fixed riggid to the hull, the flight models for mantas is very poor indeed and need alot of improvement as its very hard to control never mind hit anything.

The ole startrek beams that obsure the target also need a look at, perhaps a more descrete pulse laser effect.

The changes to aid the AI I think are very important, if they remain as is now this game isn't going to provide fluid and smooth vehical combat but the rather poor game of dogums it is now.

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I don't think the design of the vehicles/carrier/islands is either a problem OR something that is going to get changed at this this point, although I reckon that the AI & path-finding will get improved so that units can navigate better, it would also be much better if "squads" would try and stay together rather than spreading out so that your AA cover is half a mile behind your Anti-Armour Walrus which is getting a kicking from Manta's.. .. ..

G

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There's nothing wrong with the islands, or the carrier layout. BI's AI has always had issues with navigation. Always. From OFP to Arma II, it never could navigate once the land started getting a little tight, even with infantry it has difficulties.

I strongly believe the problem with their AI is it doesn't think ahead, isn't good at all with understanding vehicle limitations, and doesn't consider what other AI threads are doing with other vehicles. This leads to avoidance routines which are crude (put distance between self and another vehicle, even if that means putting itself in a difficult to maneuver position), and tries to navigate in strange routes.

A good example is a forest. A person who has no problem getting through a cluster of trees will get the AI hung up. If you watch how it navigates, it will drive between two trees, and it's as if that's all it was concerned about at that exact moment. It doesn't seem to consider the path ahead when it's doing avoidance with those two trees, causing it to run too close to a tree in front that is easily avoided if it had planned ahead a little bit. Then it kicks in those shitty avoidance routines again, where it will try to back up to get away from that tree it just about ran into... then it seems like it just drops what it's doing to get to the next waypoint as though it gave up, run it's ass into another tree, causing this whole cycle to spin out of control. There's no grace in it's navigation. No planning. It's like the waypoint system just drops a few nodes for them to get to and the movement routines just sit there dumb-faced going "OKAY :3" with no idea what it's really doing.

Another symptom showing is that when you watch the AI do turns, you can hear the engine RPM drop at each node. Again, seems to me it only evaluates what it's doing after it achieves it's one-tracked goal of GET THERE NOW, SCREW THE OBSTACLES. Once it reaches that point, then it recalculates it's route to the next waypoint, and there's that split second it takes to do so.

Finally, if you have a vehicle in front which is turning onto the road ahead just as another vehicle is pulling up to it, it will do a silly avoidance steering off the road or something like that trying to avoid hitting it. It doesn't seem to consider that the other vehicle that is turning onto the road is going to be going in the same direction; it act's like it just sees an obstacle and it needs to veer to avoid.

The AI seriously needs to be planning a few steps ahead as it moves, and figure out ways to smoothly connect each path so that it doesn't get hung up in silly ways.

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I strongly believe the problem with their AI is it doesn't think ahead, isn't good at all with understanding vehicle limitations, and doesn't consider what other AI threads are doing with other vehicles. This leads to avoidance routines which are crude (put distance between self and another vehicle, even if that means putting itself in a difficult to maneuver position), and tries to navigate in strange routes.

You hit the nail on the head with that one, the difficulties getting 4 Walruses (Leader + 3 assists) out of a base is just daft, as soon as the leader moves one of the other moves up and blocks it every time.

G

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Well from a coding viewpoiont they are just adding to problems that shouldn't and don't need to exist in the first place, I think it's because now where you have larger teams of programmers each working on their 'bit' but don't have a good understanding of how their bit effects someone else's.

Where in earlier games the team was far far smaller so everyone had a overview of everything.

Who ever is doing the modeling needs to have a grasp the limitations of what your going to be able to cater for coding it and vice versa.

And from my observations that's out of sync currently.

Having wheeled vehicals for instance in such narrow terrain with tightly packed buildings is a distaster to code for, because it can be hard enough for a human to manuver in the AI will just get stuck.

It detracts from the overall quality and feel off the gameplay immensly as vehicals need to be able to fight and flow around the battlefield like water, and there's definately some engineering elements that are preventing this.

As a engineering sample this is a start but there's a shed load more work to be done before this goes out the door.

Edited by Hawk Firestorm

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I think the reason the AI has the problems described above is that AI routefinding routines are actually VERY HARD to program. Most games don't even attempt to use proper AI navigation; they just use scripted movement and AI waypoints hard-coded into the map. I think BIS are quite pioneering in the amount of true AI they use in their games and should be applauded for this ambition because it preserves the re-playability much longer then scripting. If we were all running the latest dual socket, 24-thread Xeon workstations then I'm sure BIS would throw a lot more processor cycles at the pathfinding, but players with dual core (or less :eek:) systems would probably not be happy with the results, so it's not just a matter of doing more work.

I mostly find the AI to be useful and sometimes they need a helping hand. Perhaps, seeing as the islands are not going to be randomly generated, they could code invisible waypoints on to them that help the AI avoid choke points and other obstacles. Other then that I don't see the pathfinding advancing that much before release; I guess they borrow heavily from the Arma series and so have a lot of development behind them already.

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I think the reason the AI has the problems described above is that AI routefinding routines are actually VERY HARD to program. Most games don't even attempt to use proper AI navigation; they just use scripted movement and AI waypoints hard-coded into the map. I think BIS are quite pioneering in the amount of true AI they use in their games...

What they've done already is well ahead of most games. However, I'd like to point you to Battlezone II. It too uses open terrain and obstacles like BI's games, but even with tracked vehicles, they can navigate strange terrain and places with heavy obstacles. Still gets hung up from time to time, but as it stands, for a game from 1999 and can navigate better than BI's games, perhaps pioneering isn't entirely the term that should be used. Definitely ahead of the pack, but it's already been done better than what we are seeing.

They chose to make carrier command, and they also chose the terrain layout. I applaud them for their ambition, but bit of a reality check, that AI pathfinding needs to be fixed.

EDIT: Just make walruses hovertanks. I'll miss the wheels (feels cool) but at least navigation won't suck.

Edited by Anticept

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I think the reason the AI has the problems described above is that AI routefinding routines are actually VERY HARD to program. Most games don't even attempt to use proper AI navigation; they just use scripted movement and AI waypoints hard-coded into the map. I think BIS are quite pioneering in the amount of true AI they use in their games and should be applauded for this ambition because it preserves the re-playability much longer then scripting. If we were all running the latest dual socket, 24-thread Xeon workstations then I'm sure BIS would throw a lot more processor cycles at the pathfinding, but players with dual core (or less :eek:) systems would probably not be happy with the results, so it's not just a matter of doing more work.

I mostly find the AI to be useful and sometimes they need a helping hand. Perhaps, seeing as the islands are not going to be randomly generated, they could code invisible waypoints on to them that help the AI avoid choke points and other obstacles. Other then that I don't see the pathfinding advancing that much before release; I guess they borrow heavily from the Arma series and so have a lot of development behind them already.

I fully understand this however to begin with its best not to shoot yourself in the foot and in many ways they have, yes BI use alot of ai, as to the quality of it well..

Alot of attention has gone into the graphics but one of the fears I had originally was that not so much was being payed to the framework of the gameplay itself, and that seems to be true from what I've seen.

There's several several CC clones that have appeared over the years and game of that ilk, Hostile waters etc, all these games gameplay rely's heavily on the AI, and I find myself wondering from what I've seen so far will this game play as good, and at the moment I'd say no.

Not just because of the AI, but there are many strategic and tactical elements that aren't there, at the moment its send in mantas blow this up send in walrus's I win, not particulary rewarding.

But as I've pointed out coding the AI is hard enough if the terrain your expecting them to do it on is tougher than it needs to be, from can't push down trees to falling off ridges into gullys to narrow passages grps of vehicals can't traverse, to gradiants the vehicals have a hard time with.

And of course the vehicals themselves as with wheeled steering and a turning circle in tight places with a grp of vehicals it makes it harder for both the player and the AI to control over tracked units that can pivot.

And the carrier is a disaster when it comes to deploying walus's because of where they are deployed from, like I say the sea doors as in real life should be at the stern and as in real life for the AI there's very good reasons why you would/should do that.

And if you deploy them in combat you quickly understand why.

*post release*

Sadly it appears all my concerns have come home to roost, its a crying shame to have release any product in this state not to mention the astronomical loss of opportunity from doing so.

Edited by Hawk Firestorm

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