General Discussion (dev branch)

[Bouben 3]

AI soldiers do engage the revealed infantry target, which they can't "see", if they are given "Engage at will" command, and they will break from the formation. But with AT and vehicles things seem to be more complicated. To make sure AT engages, he must be ordered to move to a position where he has the line of sight...or he may be just clueless, trying to look around (or to the ground), not moving anywhere.

If AI is the leader, they are just stuck there.

Ideal (I guess) would be that he'd at least try to move to the target to get the LOS.

PS. Sometimes even when AT-guy sees the target, he moves at a good position, crouches, takes out his launcher and ..there is a rock blocking the line of sight.

And nothing happens. Never.

Arma3 AI is usually pretty good, often impressive, but these kind of wtf-moments may break the mission sometimes.

Thanks for the feedback. I will try to do some repro-missions "man vs man" if there is really a difference from "AT vs vehicle" scenarios.

Problem is that very often the engage process is not even initiated at all. You give the order but there is no response from the AI. See the ticket for more info and try the repro-mission.

Also, I believe there is no difference between "Engage" and "Engage at will" command apart from the automatic initiation of the engagement after a target is given in case of "Engage at will". In case of pathfinding and LOS the "Engage" and "Engage at will" commands should work the same way.

Thank you.

Edited April 25, 2014 by Bouben

[SaOk 112]

There is something wrong with vehicle sounds in the DEV-build (I had no mods enabled). Sometimes I can hear vehicle sound with full volume. There was chopper flying over that had full engine and rotor sounds, then when it was far first engine sound stopped instantly and little later rotor sounds vanished. From full volume to none. Seems to happen especially when visiting esc-menu and coming back.

[mp5gosu 10]

There is something wrong with vehicle sounds in the DEV-build (I had no mods enabled). Sometimes I can hear vehicle sound with full volume. There was chopper flying over that had full engine and rotor sounds, then when it was far first engine sound stopped instantly and little later rotor sounds vanished. From full volume to none. Seems to happen especially when visiting esc-menu and coming back.

Can confirm this. Sometimes sounds are randomly played with full volume. Should receive a ticket at http://feedback.arma3.com/

[tpw 2315]

It's a pretty serious problem actually. If the game is interrupted by pressing Esc, or simply by alt tabbing, then upon resumption any distant vehicles' sounds are played at full volume. Pretty jarring, and it certainly makes it unpleasant if you're coding or mission developing and need to pause the game frequently.

[james2464 177]

Thanks darkdruid :)

[Azzur33 1]

Also, I believe there is no difference between "Engage" and "Engage at will" command apart from the automatic initiation of the engagement after a target is given in case of "Engage at will". In case of pathfinding and LOS the "Engage" and "Engage at will" commands should work the same way.

I'm not really Sure about the differences. I modified the repro, placing myself as a leader, and two riflemen in a group, approaching the same location. Target was 1 enemy soldier, I moved so that I was the only one who could see the enemy soldier.

Then I ordered "Target" for both of them.

Nothing happened. Then "Engage". Still nothing.

The moment I gave the "Engage at will" command, they both stood up, moved forward and shot the enemy to pieces.

Problem is that very often the engage process is not even initiated at all. You give the order but there is no response from the AI.

And that is really annoying. When you expect your guy to step forward and take the enemy out, and he is like "no way, I'm staying here".

I guess there is some logic why this happens, but it doesn't suit in that particular situation.

[k0rd 3]

Hello,

Could you please create a ticket on our feedback tracker describing the problem and send me link to the ticket in response?

Thank you!

Hey thanks for following up!

I will need to get back on the dev branch (I signed back on to stable on tuesday) and see if I can make a simple repro. I'll do this ASAP.

[Bouben 3]

I'm not really Sure about the differences. I modified the repro, placing myself as a leader, and two riflemen in a group, approaching the same location. Target was 1 enemy soldier, I moved so that I was the only one who could see the enemy soldier.

Then I ordered "Target" for both of them.

Nothing happened. Then "Engage". Still nothing.

The moment I gave the "Engage at will" command, they both stood up, moved forward and shot the enemy to pieces.

And that is really annoying. When you expect your guy to step forward and take the enemy out, and he is like "no way, I'm staying here".

I guess there is some logic why this happens, but it doesn't suit in that particular situation.

Thanks for the info. Will test more.

[Azzur33 1]

I tried again with AT guy. Engage at will seems to work, But in that location, the effect usually is: "I'll engage the vehicle, but first I have to find a good place to launch" ..and he runs further, trying to get the line right, stops, crouches, and nothing. He loses the line of sight, ...a rock, a tree or just the hill is blocking him again and he is clueless. He stays there, changing between his rifle and the launcher, until I order him to disengage, hold fire and return to formation.

I guess the same thing happens with riflemen ordered to engage (/+at will) enemy they don't see, they'll try to find LOS, but in some locations, when they'll crouch to shoot, theyll lose the LOS again, and are not able to shoot.

[Annexed_Nova_Space 10]

I am a huge fan of the Arma series, and i've been playing them since Arma: Armed Assault. No other game comes close to the realism and authenticity that the Arma series offers. But never, have I regretted buying a single game as much as I have regretted buying Arma 3. :banghead:

The game itself offers a wide variety of improvements, all of which are improvements to gameplay and graphics for the most part. But the game itself runs on the most terribly optimized engine I have ever seen. I have a very high-end rig, running an Intel 4770K OC'd at 4 GHz, 32GB of RAM at 1866 MHz, and a Nvidia GTX 780 with 4GB of VRAM, all running on a single 1920x1080 monitor, and I still barely break high settings on games with multiple AI's engaged. With my setup, I should be running this game on Ultra settings had it been optimized. But I don't think you guys even put any time into optimization, I think you just wanted to release an Arma 2 with some gameplay improvements here and there, and a new graphics engine based upon what I see in Arma 3. :angryfire:

I can run the game Ultra settings when no AI's are present in a battle, but when any form of AI's enter a battle, my fps goes from a smooth 80-90 fps to a low 15. After checking my graphics card usage logs, at the same time I launched AI's into the map, the overall graphics card usage went down to about 20%. I even launched Arma 3 in windowed mode with MSI afterburner in a different window, and whenever AI's became present in a map, the usage took a complete dump from about 95% to 100% usage to 20%. I know the AI's in Arma 3 are complex, but they shouldn't be lowering GPU usage. Logically, GPU and CPU usage should be going up or remain the same when more AI's are introduced to a map, not being lowered. :386:

Until SPOTREP's, SITREP's, TECHREP's, and OPREP's in the dev blog become focused on fixing the game and optimizing the game engine, i'm not going to recommend that anyone buy this game. Seriously, you guys have had 3 games to optimize a single engine. What are you doing wrong?

[marcai 1]

With all due respect, this isn't the right thread for this kind of post. The rest of the forums have places for complaints or issues, this one is solely for reporting bugs in the dev branch. Just a heads up, the forum rules ask people to post in the right place. And don't worry, plenty of people feel the same, this isn't me saying your opinion's not valid or anything silly! :)

[LSD_Timewarp82 21]

With all due respect, this isn't the right thread for this kind of post. The rest of the forums have places for complaints or issues, this one is solely for reporting bugs in the dev branch. Just a heads up, the forum rules ask people to post in the right place. And don't worry, plenty of people feel the same, this isn't me saying your opinion's not valid or anything silly! :)

But he is totally right. Such Frameissues are far far far away of beeing "acceptable"...

[MavericK96 0]

Indeed...It's a harsh reality but I can't really disagree with much of what he said.

[Bouben 3]

It's a pretty serious problem actually. If the game is interrupted by pressing Esc, or simply by alt tabbing, then upon resumption any distant vehicles' sounds are played at full volume. Pretty jarring, and it certainly makes it unpleasant if you're coding or mission developing and need to pause the game frequently.

Can confirm. It is a few dev updates old problem.

---------- Post added at 10:28 ---------- Previous post was at 10:17 ----------

I am a huge fan of the Arma series, and i've been playing them since Arma: Armed Assault. No other game comes close to the realism and authenticity that the Arma series offers. But never, have I regretted buying a single game as much as I have regretted buying Arma 3. :banghead:

The game itself offers a wide variety of improvements, all of which are improvements to gameplay and graphics for the most part. But the game itself runs on the most terribly optimized engine I have ever seen. I have a very high-end rig, running an Intel 4770K OC'd at 4 GHz, 32GB of RAM at 1866 MHz, and a Nvidia GTX 780 with 4GB of VRAM, all running on a single 1920x1080 monitor, and I still barely break high settings on games with multiple AI's engaged. With my setup, I should be running this game on Ultra settings had it been optimized. But I don't think you guys even put any time into optimization, I think you just wanted to release an Arma 2 with some gameplay improvements here and there, and a new graphics engine based upon what I see in Arma 3. :angryfire:

I can run the game Ultra settings when no AI's are present in a battle, but when any form of AI's enter a battle, my fps goes from a smooth 80-90 fps to a low 15. After checking my graphics card usage logs, at the same time I launched AI's into the map, the overall graphics card usage went down to about 20%. I even launched Arma 3 in windowed mode with MSI afterburner in a different window, and whenever AI's became present in a map, the usage took a complete dump from about 95% to 100% usage to 20%. I know the AI's in Arma 3 are complex, but they shouldn't be lowering GPU usage. Logically, GPU and CPU usage should be going up or remain the same when more AI's are introduced to a map, not being lowered. :386:

Until SPOTREP's, SITREP's, TECHREP's, and OPREP's in the dev blog become focused on fixing the game and optimizing the game engine, i'm not going to recommend that anyone buy this game. Seriously, you guys have had 3 games to optimize a single engine. What are you doing wrong?

This is a pretty individual problem and saying that they didn't optimize their game is not objective.

I have a mediocre notebook and have constant 30 fps most of the time. Arma 3, with better graphics, is running significantly better than Arma 2 on my notebook. I was unable to play Arma 2 in native resolution with enough FPS but now I am able to in Arma 3 and with some other effects and details on top of it that would make Arma 2 unplayable on my notebook. And I know another guy that has the same experience as me. So I am not denying there are problems but these problems are not universal and not every user is experiencing it while some users experience a significant performance boost with Arma 3.

But I guess you have written your post out of frustration so your tone is understandable.

[Bouben 3]

I tried again with AT guy. Engage at will seems to work, But in that location, the effect usually is: "I'll engage the vehicle, but first I have to find a good place to launch" ..and he runs further, trying to get the line right, stops, crouches, and nothing. He loses the line of sight, ...a rock, a tree or just the hill is blocking him again and he is clueless. He stays there, changing between his rifle and the launcher, until I order him to disengage, hold fire and return to formation.

I guess the same thing happens with riflemen ordered to engage (/+at will) enemy they don't see, they'll try to find LOS, but in some locations, when they'll crouch to shoot, theyll lose the LOS again, and are not able to shoot.

Yes, I also think that LOS is playing a major part in this bug.

Have you tried my repro-mission AI_engage_bug_AT_test.Stratis_2.zip according to instructions in my ticket?

What were your results? Thanks, man!

[pettka 694]

I can run the game Ultra settings when no AI's are present in a battle, but when any form of AI's enter a battle, my fps goes from a smooth 80-90 fps to a low 15. After checking my graphics card usage logs, at the same time I launched AI's into the map, the overall graphics card usage went down to about 20%. I even launched Arma 3 in windowed mode with MSI afterburner in a different window, and whenever AI's became present in a map, the usage took a complete dump from about 95% to 100% usage to 20%. I know the AI's in Arma 3 are complex, but they shouldn't be lowering GPU usage. Logically, GPU and CPU usage should be going up or remain the same when more AI's are introduced to a map, not being lowered. :386:

First of all, welcome to the forums :icon_twisted:

I would dare to differ. Your point is mainly about AI being not optimized, which is caused by many different reasons, but there has been quite a lot of optimization in this way. The obvious issue is that Arma (all of them) isn't as player centric as various other games - it is possible in most cases that AI could finish/fail some mission on it's own even without player being involved, like it is in the real life. That means AI needs to be able to act independently, but that is a bit off topic here. The logical result is that AI is quite performance hungry as it does the same computations no matter if it is right in front of player or kilometres away :bounce2:

It has been already mentioned here that one of the most taxing part of AI computation is pathfinding. Our AI is able to handle dynamic surrounding changes (structures being destroyed, paths blocked by wrecks or endangered by enemy and so on), this ability has been optimized over the years of development, but it may seem that it is still quite performance heavy during some bigger changes (eg. spawning 50 soldiers together or some battle in town). Our missions take that into concern and are quite well optimized, but it may not be a cause of all the missions. The question at hand is if we should allow to throw sand from our sandbox into delicate oiled machinery of engine and I dare say that we should enable the players to do what they want despite it may break the immersion for them if they do it wrong :icon_twisted: We provide them the sandbox to play with for hundreds of hours and they do, You do.

[mistyronin 1181]

It has been already mentioned here that one of the most taxing part of AI computation is pathfinding. Our AI is able to handle dynamic surrounding changes (structures being destroyed, paths blocked by wrecks or endangered by enemy and so on), this ability has been optimized over the years of development, but it may seem that it is still quite performance heavy during some bigger changes (eg. spawning 50 soldiers together or some battle in town).

I don't want to sound grumpy, but I think you are too optimistic. Specially with vehicles AI, that have the amazing tendency of killing their own side soldiers ( specially if they are on the same squad ), and are unable to go from point A to point B without crashing with everything, not even with "relax behavior" they use roads.

It goes to the point that an APC is unable to go straight forward 100 mts in a town's street, without turning around like crazy and crashing against walls and buildings. That makes urban combat almost impossible ( specially if you want to use armor to cover infantry advance, but at the same time using infantry to protect armor from AT light weapons ).

All that kind of odd behaviors is translated in the inability to properly finish a mission because your vehicle has crashed or more usual, because your own AI mates have killed you.

[ProfTournesol 956]

I wonder why vehicles pathfinding is so bad compared to OFP, apart from the islands being much more complex of course.

[Tonci87 163]

While I fully agree with your points Pettka and totally understand and endorse that you don´t want to sacrifice AI intelligence to more FPS for all I still kind of have to agree with Annexed_Nova_Space.

You see if I play Arma 3 in the Editor all is fine and beautifull, I have solid 50 FPS with my settings. However, throw in a few AI fighting each other and my FPS goes down to around 30, if it is many AIs even to 20.

This problem isn´t that visible in Arma 2. I can run missions with lots of AI, and AI Mods on top, just fine at 60 FPS. So what exactly has changed since Arma 2? I would really like to understand where all that computing power goes.

Can you guys reproduce this on your Studio PCs? Maybe it has something to do with individual setups? If this is the case I´ll be very glad to help with testing.

And sadly the driving AI is indeed abysmal in Arma 3, it is even worse than in Arma 2. So I´ll ask again, did you guys review my Repros, did you see anything usefull in them? Should I make more?

[das attorney 858]

You see if I play Arma 3 in the Editor all is fine and beautifull, I have solid 50 FPS with my settings. However, throw in a few AI fighting each other and my FPS goes down to around 30, if it is many AIs even to 20.

Hi mate,

Just to add to this:

I find I can have fairly complex non-ai scripts going on (and also objects spawned into the scene) and performance is pretty good.

Although when I spawn AI in, (lets assume for now they're not hostile and are wandering about patrolling) then as soon as I turn around to look at them, the FPS drops off. It then goes up if I look away.

So it seems that rendering them and their animations on screen is sucking up a lot of processing time. Admittedly, rendering any object sucks up CPU time but AI more so than say empty vehicles or objects.

If then they turn hostile and the combat FSM's kick in, the FPS drops lower. Presumably as the FSM's start their combat pathfinding and so on.

This is all observational of course.

Edited April 26, 2014 by Das Attorney

[scruffy 22]

It's a pretty serious problem actually. If the game is interrupted by pressing Esc, or simply by alt tabbing, then upon resumption any distant vehicles' sounds are played at full volume. Pretty jarring, and it certainly makes it unpleasant if you're coding or mission developing and need to pause the game frequently.

There is a video in this post: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?152866-General-Discussion-%28dev-branch%29&p=2668113&viewfull=1#post2668113

Ticket already assigned: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=18552

[SaOk 112]

AI is very CPU heavy when near big villages, similar stutter was also with biggest villages in Takistan and Zargabad. ArmA3 just have much big open house villages (but the most stutter come from those big white dome structures with camps around them). Strange is that the FPS stays good (with diag_fps, over 40), but it can still stutter much when near villages. Must be some heavy oscilating stuff going with load spread unevenly (e.g. idle time and then all AI stuff counted at the same time?)?

Edited April 26, 2014 by SaOk

[Tankbuster 1747]

I wonder why vehicles pathfinding is so bad compared to OFP, apart from the islands being much more complex of course.

AI driving is a constant source of frustration. I'm not convinced island complexity is the reason though. Corazol, Paraiso and Bagango had some pretty funky road networks, and I don't remember APCs making a massive dogs dinner of a simple left turn, bashing repeatedly into a building corner because they made the turn too early.

[nikiforos 450]

First of all, welcome to the forums :icon_twisted:

I would dare to differ. Your point is mainly about AI being not optimized, which is caused by many different reasons, but there has been quite a lot of optimization in this way. The obvious issue is that Arma (all of them) isn't as player centric as various other games - it is possible in most cases that AI could finish/fail some mission on it's own even without player being involved, like it is in the real life. That means AI needs to be able to act independently, but that is a bit off topic here. The logical result is that AI is quite performance hungry as it does the same computations no matter if it is right in front of player or kilometres away :bounce2:

It has been already mentioned here that one of the most taxing part of AI computation is pathfinding. Our AI is able to handle dynamic surrounding changes (structures being destroyed, paths blocked by wrecks or endangered by enemy and so on), this ability has been optimized over the years of development, but it may seem that it is still quite performance heavy during some bigger changes (eg. spawning 50 soldiers together or some battle in town). Our missions take that into concern and are quite well optimized, but it may not be a cause of all the missions. The question at hand is if we should allow to throw sand from our sandbox into delicate oiled machinery of engine and I dare say that we should enable the players to do what they want despite it may break the immersion for them if they do it wrong :icon_twisted: We provide them the sandbox to play with for hundreds of hours and they do, You do.

This statement says it all. I think the administrator can now lock the thread : Low CPU utilization & Low FPS.

If you said that before mr.pettka a lot of people would have been moved on to other games much earlier.

Edited April 26, 2014 by Nikiforos

[byku 13]

...

... and that's why in a way I love Arma(no irony here) ;)

Edited April 26, 2014 by Byku