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Suranis

Workarounds for Walrus pathfinding

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Ok This thread isn't for whining about the Walrus Pathfinding. This is a thread for methods on how to deal with it so we can enjoy the game a lot more.

Ok, after experimenting a bit with it I've found several methods.

The Big one is simple., Set separate destinations for each walrus. Its actually pretty easy. Pres 6, click mouse, then 7 *click* 8 *Click* 9 *click*. After a couple of tries and practice, doing this is very fast. The destinations can be pretty close to one another, but as long as they are not the same destination most of the Walruses will happily line up and head for the destination. Generally only one will get hung up on something, and that only happens about 40% of the time. I've actually gotten Walruses to line up and cross a bridge with this method, with little nudging. (The last one got stuck at the end, but it was no problem taking manual control of it and charging in myself)

Don't use "Assist" to drag the walruses after you unless you are in fairly open terrain. Since YOU (or the assisted walrus) is the destination, and therefore the destination is the same, the Walruses will snarl up. Only hit assist when you are in a fight, and the walruses will surround and fight with you. Think of assist as issuing a battle command for the group, not a travel command.

Stick to the roads unless you are running one manually. This one is pretty much a no brainier. The walrus is actually a very good ATV in human hands, but the AI cant handle it. If you want to do that sneaky cross country raid, then you are doing it on your own unless you are willing to swap between them constantly. Sorry. Thankfully the road network on the Islands is pretty good and will get you everywhere you need to go.

I've actually gotten the path-finding AI to down to just minor annoyance levels, with just very occasional babysitting, using these methods and on my last map I had some rip roaring fights with AI walruses and a hell of a lot of fun

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-Assist: A good and quite reliable way to have the Walrusses follow you, is by creating a chain:

Pilot walrus six. Seven assists you. Eight assists seven, and nine assists eight. This way, they keep their distance and don't get snared onto eachother. It's the best way to move your ground forces from one point to another. Drive accordingly though; sharp turns or pit stops are best done with a quick radial menu pause all command.

-Assist in combat: The above only works when travelling. For combat situations, it's best to target something, then use the radial menu attack command to send them all off shooting. When the target is destroyed (even if you did the killing) they will be on standby, and won't move until an enemy shows up.

-Make sure everything's on defensive. On offensive, they create waypoints in the direction of any enemy they spot, thus running off into the wilderness and off cliffs.

-It seems as if it's slope angles that messes them up. Stick to roads and flat ground. When going offroad or up steep narrow roads, make sure they're all keeping distance from eachother and prepare to micromanage.

---------- Post added at 03:11 ---------- Previous post was at 03:05 ----------

...or, rename your walrusses to "Lemmings" and play the game accordingly :p

Edited by Dreadnought808

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The chain idea is interesting... how do you select a specific unit for assist? All I can ever do is have ALL of them go into assist mode.

The problem with any mode is that when under attack, the AI just drive randomly... if attacked on a road with drop offs into lava... they'll just drive into the lava and die.

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You select a vehicle/more vehicles, then press shift+<anothervehicle>

Try it, I always confuse it. Maybe vice versa.

On the cards the number of the vehicle, which will be assisted, appears on the ones who have to assist.

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the bad thing is that i think the ai is the same as the arma driver ai, i dont see some changes. that is for me a huge disappointment and i goodamn hope arma3 will do this better.

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Yeah I noticed yesterday how they tend to get less stuck when not giving them the exact same destination. The assist line on travel is a good idea I'm going to try it. I think this should be a sticky so people can actually enjoy the game.

ALSO devs should take notice about this "same destination" issues to improve pathfinding! Maybe add an extra line modifying the actual final waypoint size or position if it is the exact same ass another Walrus. It shouldn't be that hard but I'm not a programmer though.

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I've taken to sending my Walruses around in pairs. Barring the odd crazy moment where they try to navigate a ten point turn around that imaginary rock, they do ok.

Now if I can only get my Mantas to understand the range of machine guns, and how not to hover outside that range being inept while being shot at with lasers, I'll be on my way. Would be nice if I could persuade them to do strafing runs instead of hovering like a nice big visible, yet vulnerable target, too.

Probably hoping too much on that last point.

And on a related note - the Carrier thinks it's a good idea to fire at enemy Mantas with the fore-mounted plasma cannon. Resulted in my Walruses taking (un)friendly fire. :D

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I send them in pairs with a distance between them, controlling the second first walrus

6

7

8

9

Where I would control 7. If 6 has a seizure I'd be able to switch and untangle before the column grinds to a halt and if 6 and 7 is engaged 8 and 9 usually catches up and joins in.

And on a related note - the Carrier thinks it's a good idea to fire at enemy Mantas with the fore-mounted plasma cannon. Resulted in my Walruses taking (un)friendly fire. :D

Mine tried using shells.

I didn't really know what to say

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I think, but I can not confirm this as I only played 1 time doing so, Gamebooster improves the walrus AI immensly for me :)

But, before I can be conclusive this would need another few tries but I call it a night now.

I captured one island just now after I decided to play a little and when I started the game I decided to do it through gamebooster. This program shuts down all unneeded processes etc to help get games running better. My rig sucks, its old and abused so I have a hard time playing Arma with non-1986 graphics. Thats why i installed gamebooster a while back. Although with Arma I am not really impressed with it and so I hardly use it tonight I decided to try it with CC.

And, my eyes are still wet from laughing. My walrusses actually drove as if they have hardly any pathfinding issues at all.

They even went through forrests and between rocks as if it was just a road. I also saw them navigate between a few building, ok it went slow but if I would have driven there myself it would have been slow as well as the space between building is sometimes very narrow.

Ok, ok, I have to admit I had to safe 1 walrus once which was stuck on a rock and 2 or 3 times I saw a walrus spin a lovely circle of dust on the road. But other than that.........I just captured an island with 4 walrusses while I managed 1 myself, 1 was assisting me and 2 others were also "tied" to eachother but I gave them map orders only (attack, move).

But, imagine capturing an island with only 4 pathfinding screwups? This morning I lost all 4 walrusses and cause I was fighting their behaviour I lost 2 mantas as well..........on a weak island.

So, maybe someone else can try this Gamebooster?

I use an older version beta 3.5

http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

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Foxhound, you got lucky. It seems you picked an island that was easy for the AI to navagate, but do please play for a while longer and you will see why people thnik the pathfinding is bad.

It seems like walrus pathfinding works ok on some islands and glitghes badly on others. ( IE: Building and wall humping, spinning doughnuts, refuseing to move from the spot even though it is not stuck, and driving off a bridge and or cliff)

But, no matter how fast you make your computer run, it will never change how the AI will behave. Granted, it will make the game run better if you shut down all that other stuff that you don't need, but the Pathing AI will always go from point A to point B and head to point C, yet, fall off of bridge D on the way. - Making it run faster will never make it think better.

Now, back on topic:

I use procexp from microsoft (it is a better task manager by far) - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

It not only shows you what is running, it shows you who made it and how much processor and memory the process is takeing up. It will also show you the stuff that is hidden from the task manager.

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Foxhound, you got lucky. It seems you picked an island that was easy for the AI to navagate, but do please play for a while longer and you will see why people thnik the pathfinding is bad.

It seems like walrus pathfinding works ok on some islands and glitghes badly on others. ( IE: Building and wall humping, spinning doughnuts, refuseing to move from the spot even though it is not stuck, and driving off a bridge and or cliff)

But, no matter how fast you make your computer run, it will never change how the AI will behave. Granted, it will make the game run better if you shut down all that other stuff that you don't need, but the Pathing AI will always go from point A to point B and head to point C, yet, fall off of bridge D on the way. - Making it run faster will never make it think better.

Thats nonsense. Pathfinding is just a search through a tree diagram. When there is more time to go through nodes, or you can go through them faster, of course your result will be better. To put it simply: If you have 1 second to think and need 0.1 second to look at a node but there are 100 nodes, you will only have looked at 10 of them and make your decision based on them. But if you can reduce the time to look at a node to 0.05 seconds, you will have looked at 20 nodes. Thus, you can make a better decision.

Though I doubt it would make such a big difference, it mgiht help some.

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I still think it is well possible, also with Arma hardware components (CPU) influence the capabilities of the AI. So why not in CC?

But like I said, I only tried this once and you can be sure I will try it more when I have some time just to see if I was really lucky or not.

Maybe i go back to my previous island where I really fought with the walrus pathfinding to compare, although it is now a freindly island so that too might influence it.

I will report back with my findings later :)

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If the processor influences the AI, then that would imply that there is a time limit on how long the AI has to search the nodes. Doing this, while makeing the AI seem to respond faster, would make it so that you would often have incomplete node searches. If the node search is incomplete, then you run the risk of an incomplete and/or bad path (like driving over a bridge).

Instead, (at least to me when I zoom way in) it looks like the AI has no time limit, but instead searches smaller node segments; ) smaller segment equals less nodes to search equals less time needed to search and react. You will also note that the AI can't seem to clear out the closets node fast enough resulting in start stop behavor (zoom in all the way and you will see it)

I would love to see your results Foxhound, but I should note that on my computer I see path finding issues and it is a big work horse:

OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601

Other OS Description Not Available

OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation

**

System Manufacturer CLEVO CO.

System Model X7200

System Type x64-based PC

Processor Intel® Core i7 CPU X 990 @ 3.47GHz, 3459 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)

BIOS Version/Date Phoenix Technologies LTD 6.00, 11/15/2010

SMBIOS Version 2.6

**

**

**

Locale United States

Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "6.1.7601.17514"

**

Time Zone Pacific Daylight Time

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 12.0 GB

Total Physical Memory 12.0 GB

Available Physical Memory 9.60 GB

Total Virtual Memory 24.0 GB

Available Virtual Memory 21.3 GB

Page File Space 12.0 GB

**

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Does that mean that the game files can be tweaked to force the AI to look through more nodes?

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The pathfinding issues seem to vary from one island to the other and it's definitly not related to the CPU processing capacity. If this were the case we should be getting mixed replys regarding Walrus AI some people even saying it is ok, but no one is defending it or saying it's ok.

They seem to have problems on mountainous islands. Mostly because I think it doesn't realize it can climb some small slopes.

Is the AI for Walruses the same no matter the armor equipped ? Because I'm not sure but a lightly equipped Walrus should be able to climb more easly because of the higher speed they can achieve so if they had a slightly different AI it would help lighter units to transverse hilly terrain more easily. Of course is a pain to test.

If they AI is the same for land units then they are effectively limiting the capacity of the pathfinding to the capabilities of a very heavy Warlus. Also maybe they could "cheat" a little bit the acceleration of AI controlled units to help them get around terrain.

I'm being clear right? because I speak spanish natively.

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