AI kills the performance completely (instructions how to test inside)

[max power 21]

Well, I guess personally my point would be that the same exact issues have been in ArmA 2 for, what, 4+ years? And still not resolved.

I think people just want to make sure that ArmA 3 gets the work it needs. Performance issues have been a severe hamper on ArmA 2 sales and popularity over the years.

Well, they can scale down the AI and make it more stupid...

[RadioActiveLobster 10]

I've noticed just in the showcases how it can kill my FPS

Infantry Showcase (runs fine, I don't think there are more than 20 AI at a time during this one)

Scuba Showcase (runs fine as well, not a lot of AI)

Vehicle (Runs fine for the most part, towards end it starts to get slower as more AI are present)

Helicopter (Almost unplayable from the start, rarely goes over 20 FPS for me)

[Seil 10]

A note on performance that we [WotG] confirmed last night: The current ArmA3 Urban Patrol Script is awful on performance. If you are using the UPS script addon for your missions, you'll see MASSIVE lag from AI operations. If you remove that addon and use stock AI, you'll notice a much smoother experience and be able to utilize a lot more AI in a mission.

-Seil

[MavericK96 0]

Well, they can scale down the AI and make it more stupid...

I think it just needs more optimization. ;)

Not trying to rip on anyone or the ArmA series, clearly I have been around here a long time and have played countless hours of ArmA since the original OFP. I just want to be as vocal as possible about issues that have plagued ArmA 2 for so long, so maybe we can see significant improvement in ArmA 3 with the community Alpha (which is a brilliant idea).

[tremanarch 6]

smoke has a huge fps hit. dunno why. is the air -> smoke calced by CPU? whgy not let it be calced by PhysX?

[chrisb 196]

Like the video above, it will be possible at some stage to do the same with Arma3 (1500 ai), but it only leads to a shoot fest, no real ai intelligence, too many off them to be thinking about for the cpu to cope. Just end up with a dumb battle, looks impressive, but thats about it really..

More enjoyment can be made from smaller skirmish type missions, that way the ai are pretty intelligent, provided you have the right ai mods to go with them, or mix of mods..

It will all come with time..:)

[Seil 10]

For the record, we're seeing decent results in urban CQB scenarios utilizing smaller enemy squads, 3-4 ai per squad. Just setting them up properly with all the various attributes in the waypoints.... They act pretty smart from what we're seeing.... I guess I would like to know and see more specifics about the AI functionality that is "not smart"....

The biggest issue I've seen is difficulty for the AI squads to stay tight in some areas with many obstacles. Even then however, I'm seeing them pie corners and minimize their exposure while engaging targets.

Furthermore, nearly every engagement we find ourselves in, the AI properly establishes a base of fire with one or more squads while others maneuver. This is the type of behavior that's expected really...

Areas I know other people cite as problematic that WotG has tested and found working fine in A3:Alpha (Not to say there isn't a need for improvement in some areas):

AI seeing through vegetation: They see the same thing you do... If there's a moving object partially obscured by vegetation, the AI properly detects the movement and assumes it's something to investigate. Most of the time when the AI knows you're behind a bush, they watched you get there.

AI seeing you from a distance while you are partially obscured from good cover: We spot enemies like this all the time and it's only natural that the AI can spot your head moving around over the top of a wall or similar. Motion attracts the eye, moving along the same routes without exposing yourself proves that the AI can only see you when you're exposed.

AI Detects you by sound / other OBVIOUS events: They don't have to see you to know you're there. Just like I don't have to see you to know you're there (that's how my grenade lands at your feet EVERY TIME)... They also will respond to the presence of gun fire / tracers - even if not directed at them specifically.

The AI communicates: Some AI will direct others towards a threat zone that has been identified; Just like you'd call your team to maneuver to support you.

The AI just walks around stupidly and doesn't pay attention to you: The mission designer did not adequately set or trigger the combat mode, awareness and behavior attributes for the unit / unit's waypoints.

Every AI unit recognizes you and begins to engage from afar: You are NOT concealed in your movements to close the ground, and are not being aware of your surroundings. (This is where you are required to have a strategy, not just run through the open)

The AI walks through doors / walls: We call this the "Jesus Walk" and yes it's an actual bug (as of ArmA2, haven't seen it happen yet in A3). I did see an AI run around a wall and choose to cross into the yard via an area of the wall that had been blown apart that humans would also choose to cross at that point.

The AI has morale: They will change their behavior based on the situation; If you have 20 guys ambushing the AI, they will lose morale and begin to route if they feel like they're overwhelmed and need to retreat to survive the fight. (If you start shooting at a whole squad by yourself, they'll recognize a single target is engaging them and work to overcome. If you have a whole squad engaging them instead of just one man, and you can inflict enough casualties immediately with surprise, they will be less motivated to counter-attack. OTHER AI UNITS will still continue to press you however.)

The AI will attempt to use buildings, windows, doorways etc to gain a vantage point on their target and engage from cover. This is a little more rare than other behaviors, but does happen without the use of any special scripts and does have a very strong effect on engagements in urban environments. They don't have to do it every time to force you to stay aware of the fact that they could realistically be taking elevated vantage points overlooking your position. Meaning your squad still has to cover those places in their fire sectors all of the time.

AI attempts to utilize cover / minimize exposure to enemies: Worst case, they'll drop prone and increase the difficulty to hit them; when available they attempt to use cover and lean out to engage.

AI uses suppressing fire: They will use their belt fed weapons by default, but not required to pin you down with suppressing fire. The most unrealistic part of this that I have seen is that human players think they're superman and try to lean out of a corner that is CLEARLY being suppressed with incoming fire. When suppressing fire is coming in, it means you will die if you attempt to re-engage from that corner again - find another way to maneuver.

AI uses smoke for obstruction: If hit somewhat hard/surprised the AI will drop smoke to obscure your line of sight and maneuver (retreating the engaged area and finding a new angle to attack you from.

--------------------

Performance tuning the mission:

Every AI is running a loop as described earlier. If you have too many things happening all at the same time, it will delay the response of each AI, as they are taking turns to access CPU power. This means that if you can only handle running 50 AI alive at any time, then by putting 200 in there, you're going to make the AI "dumber" by slowing down the response of everyone.

Here the way to balance the performance / mission size is about detecting when squads have been eliminated and replacing them with dynamically created ones. (Thus getting more AI without overrunning the performance threshold of how many can be alive at once.)

--------------------

Please cite specific details of the AI's short comings.

-Seil

Edited March 8, 2013 by Seil

[MavericK96 0]

smoke has a huge fps hit. dunno why. is the air -> smoke calced by CPU? whgy not let it be calced by PhysX?

PhysX is running off the CPU, soooo....

[Tonmeister 14]

smoke has a huge fps hit. dunno why. is the air -> smoke calced by CPU? whgy not let it be calced by PhysX?

this is a possibility. now that infantry are leaving dust trails behind them as they walk, this may need optimisation.

[MavericK96 0]

I can also confirm that AI is heavily un-optimized in this Alpha (not a huge surprise though, I guess). Even with a 4-squad 2v2 thing going, framerate drops to near unplayable levels. Same area of the map with no AI is at least 10-15 FPS higher.

[jumpinghubert 48]

Like the video above, it will be possible at some stage to do the same with Arma3 (1500 ai), but it only leads to a shoot fest, no real ai intelligence, too many off them to be thinking about for the cpu to cope. Just end up with a dumb battle, looks impressive, but thats about it really..

More enjoyment can be made from smaller skirmish type missions, that way the ai are pretty intelligent, provided you have the right ai mods to go with them, or mix of mods..

It will all come with time..:)

I wasn´t able to reproduce this 1500er scenario with my rig. Maybe tweaked AI to zero-ability.

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

I can also confirm that AI is heavily un-optimized in this Alpha (not a huge surprise though, I guess). Even with a 4-squad 2v2 thing going, framerate drops to near unplayable levels. Same area of the map with no AI is at least 10-15 FPS higher.

How do you figure that it's AI that is unoptimised?

Haven't you people considered that the added strain of PhysX calculations on every tangible entity in your missions is the culprit, even if AI optimisation stays roughly the same as it was in ArmA II? (Which I suspect to be the case w/ AI)

Since multi-threading isn't exactly stellar in ArmA series, you will have to overclock your CPUs to 5 GHz, if you want to have anything more than a few squads running around.

End of story, until/if devs post their thoughts on this.

[b00tsy 28]

smoke has a huge fps hit. dunno why. is the air -> smoke calced by CPU? whgy not let it be calced by PhysX?

It's because of the amount of particles they pooh out. you can adjust the particle amount/quality in the graphic settings menu I believe.

[igneous01 19]

you know what would really contribute to the games improvement? SUBMITTING TICKETS FOR ANY ISSUES YOU ENCOUNTER, WITH REPRO STEPS.

Alpha does not mean 'early access to game', Alpha and Beta stages are all about breaking things in the game and providing feedback to the developer so they can fix it. So please, if you bought the alpha, do your part and submit these tickets to the developers to let them know something is wrong. I see countless speculation from posters with under 400 posts complaining about issues but not providing any evidence, nor bothering to submit a ticket to let the developers know.

http://feedback.arma3.com/view_all_bug_page.php

Please people, use this. Thats why the community alpha was released, so that feedback would be provided.

[johncage 30]

the problem is, we're not sure of the root cause, it may be ai itself, or the things they do(shooting, explosions, generating smoke everywhere, etc), or a mix of both. it's good to get a discussion going on this subject to further pinpoint the cause. that is also part of testing. not just everyone independently submitting tickets with conflicting and contradictory reports confusing the devs.

[-=Grunt=- 10]

Having multi-threaded AI would really be great. (If it isn't multi-threaded at the moment)

When playing and monitoring CPU usage with my OSD (On Screen Display), it shows that the first core has the most load 70-90% while the other cores only get 40-70% load. The 3rd and 4th cores have the lowest load of them all.

Using an i5 3570K at 3.8 Ghz.

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Offloading physics onto a separate core would be a dream. No idea if that's at all possible.

[TheKhann 10]

OP, please create a bug report and add the steps that you have described here. This really seems to be the biggest problem with the Alpha right now, in missions with lots of AI it is unplayable, so it needs to be addressed. Post the bug number here and i will vote for it. Guessing as to where the problem lies is pointless, best thing is to create the bug report and let the BI dev team have a look at it.

[Fuse 1]

Sorry if I've misunderstood something, but you all keep saying it's the AI that is slowing you down, but then many of you say it's the same online. Why would AI running on a server be slowing down your FPS? More likely it's an issue with rendering the units or the effects associated with them.

Yet it's being done in another game just fine.

The CPU usage in general in this game seems pretty shitty, and the AI should be much better optimized now. ArmA 2 AI would look at every freaking object around and spend 20 minutes figuring out where to go. ArmA 3 AI isn't much more complex, but is more efficient (supposedly) at things like pathfinding, so it should actually have LESS of an influence.

Name one game where the AI has as many possible actions as the Arma series where AI was done better. Arcade shooters where AI only has a handful of ways to move are a lot simpler.

Last night I loaded up the editor and plopped about 20 infantry of various types down on the airfield to see if AI was really an issue, spawned my self up on a hill, and just enjoyed the show. My FPS dropped by an average of 4 frames during the fight. I'm not running anything super fancy, just an i5 2500k, GTX 570, and 8GB of RAM. CPU and GPU are OCed.

I really don't think AI is the problem you guys are experiencing. I could be wrong.

[aop 1]

I really don't think AI is the problem you guys are experiencing. I could be wrong.

How about you run the test in the first post and come back with your results?

[TheKhann 10]

Sorry if I've misunderstood something, but you all keep saying it's the AI that is slowing you down, but then many of you say it's the same online. Why would AI running on a server be slowing down your FPS? More likely it's an issue with rendering the units or the effects associated with them.

Server fps in arma affects client fps greatly. I run a mission on my server that has about 180 AI on constantly ( dual xeon processors, 24gb ram ), server fps is lower than 10 all the time (about 7 on average). Blitzkrieg PvP mission, no AI, 24-32 players on, server fps does not fall bellow 40.

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Server fps in arma affects client fps greatly. I run a mission on my server that has about 180 AI on constantly ( dual xeon processors, 24gb ram ), server fps is lower than 10 all the time (about 7 on average). Blitzkrieg PvP mission, no AI, 24-32 players on, server fps does not fall bellow 40.

This.

Client FPS is wholly dependent on Server FPS performance with missions w/ AI - has always been so. No idea why the server limits client FPS - perhaps to keep everything in sync?

[Fuse 1]

How about you run the test in the first post and come back with your results?

How about reading my post? You would have seen that I did test my FPS in A3 with and without AI. I'm not going to reinstall A2 for this because that wouldn't actually tell me anything useful. If 40+ units doesn't provide a noticeable FPS hit vs no units, then I'd say AI is not "killing performance".

Server fps in arma affects client fps greatly. I run a mission on my server that has about 180 AI on constantly ( dual xeon processors, 24gb ram ), server fps is lower than 10 all the time (about 7 on average). Blitzkrieg PvP mission, no AI, 24-32 players on, server fps does not fall bellow 40.

I understand now. Thanks for explaining.

Edited March 10, 2013 by Fuse

[aop 1]

How about reading my post? You would have seen that I did test my FPS in A3 with and without AI. I'm not going to reinstall A2 for this because that wouldn't actually tell me anything useful. If 40+ units doesn't provide a noticeable FPS hit vs no units, then I'd say AI is not "killing performance".

So you are saying all the testing in the first post is wrong without doing the test yourself?

edit: And your test sucks anyways, 20 AIs is really small number and you spawned them on airfield which means they are not going to use much resources for pathfinding like spawning them in city would do.

[Fuse 1]

Roughly 20 AI per side, so over 40 in total, as you would see if you read the post you just quoted. "Airfield" doesn't mean "runway". I spawned them positioned in groups around buildings at opposite ends of the airfield so the two forces would work their way towards each other across the base, rather than just have two ranks open fire on each other (that would be boring and pretty short).

Take a chill pill. Someone saying "I'm not sure this is right, but I could be wrong" is not some kind of personal attack. If you don't want other people to share their thoughts and experiences in an attempt to help then don't start a thread.