AI Discussion (dev branch)

[krycek 349]

The MQ-12 Falcon AI is a bit buggy, with DAGR+Scalpel loadout vs 2 armored vehicles(moving or not moving) around it will prefer to use DAGR on the first target.That's the first problem, the second problem is that on secondary target it will start to move away but it flies erratically going in a short circle(not to be confused with loiter wp) and not engaging. Adding a Darter to lase targets doesn't prevent this.

 

I noticed it's behaviour always breaks down on secondary target after it destroyed the first.

With full Scalpel loadout it's better meaning it will engage the secondary target but I noticed it still does the small circle somewhere after destroying the first target. I assume the invisible gunner doesn't get a good los with the pilot doing those short circles.

Ordering it to loiter somewhere breaks the short circle bug but it will have the same buggy engaging behaviour with secondary target. I would say 70% of the time not even a destroy wp on the enemy vehicle will manage to stop the short circles or the buggy engaging with secondary targets ( or they aren't payed enough for multiple targets and decide "meh screw it"😝 )

[Liberty Bull 23]

Thanks kju

[pierremgi 4853]

Hi all,

I'm wondering, as new feature, if it could be possible, in editor, to replace the black line between the group (or the previous waypoint) and the waypoint icon, by a broken-line tracing as calculated path? Something like the calculatePath drawing but in editor. That could be fine for elaborate paths with a visual tool in 3den.

Thanks

[mickeymen 324]

Increasingly, I am disappointed with Artificial Intelligences in the game. Very often it does not take into account the current waypoints or their settings (completion radius, placement radius).  

AI does not hear shots when it should hear or does not see the enemy when it should see and vice versa. There are a lot of omissions.

 

I remember very well as before (3-4 years ago)  AI did not see their enemies through the smoke screens, now more and more often I notice that smoke grenades are useless!

Today, at the end of the game’s life, I throw 3-4 smoke grenades between the enemy AI and me, but the AI will always see me. Omg! he does not stop shooting in thick smoke, he shoots accurately, as if smoke does not exist!

Same thing in the jungle of Tanoa or in other forests. AI will always see their enemies through the foliage of trees, while the player cannot see them.

It’s unfortunate that AI-related issues have been ignored for so long,  as a result, at the end of the game’s life, the player has a ton of DLC, and an unfinished/partially broken AI.

The older the game, the worse the AI,  all this is very sad...

[JB47394 30]

On 1/28/2020 at 10:02 AM, mickeymen said:

now more and more often I notice that smoke grenades are useless!

 

I apologize for not having a link, but somebody did a survey of AI behaviors and my recollection is that a single AI will not see through smoke.  However, with the ARMA "group think" behavior, if one AI knows about your location, all AI in the group knows about it.  So it works a bit like this.

 

AI 1: He's at [10711.4,5301.1,110.6].

AI 2: I can't see him.  There's smoke.

AI 1: Just trust me.  He's there.

AI 2: Okay.

AI 2: <headshots player through smoke>

 

If you mess with the "commanding" skill, it should slow down the rate at which any given AI shares information with other AI, but I have no idea what the impact might be.  The wiki only says that the skill "Affects how quickly recognized targets are shared with the group"

 

You could also put every AI into its own group, but that would come at a higher computational cost.

[joostsidy 685]

15 hours ago, JB47394 said:

So it works a bit like this.

 

 

AI 1: Just trust me. He's there.. at heading 231.23, distance 45.32m, heightASL. 1.72m.

AI 2: Got it.. <cocks charging handle>

[mickeymen 324]

On 2/6/2020 at 2:23 AM, JB47394 said:

 

I apologize for not having a link, but somebody did a survey of AI behaviors and my recollection is that a single AI will not see through smoke.  However, with the ARMA "group think" behavior, if one AI knows about your location, all AI in the group knows about it.  So it works a bit like this.

 

In what year was the survey conducted? Maybe the 2020 game is different from that old game

In fact, since about 2019, I began to observe how smoke grenades no longer save me. Enemy AI continues to shoot accurately through the smokescreens

[JB47394 30]

Here's the list, updated as of January 1, 2020.  That doesn't mean that they tested everything on the list on that day.  It means that they're still tracking AI behavior to some degree in an effort to reflect the latest behaviors.

I just ran a smoke test against a fire team group of CSAT, all on a vanilla dedicated server.  The distance was about 15 meters and I used three white smoke grenades to create a pretty healthy amount of smoke.  There was a light breeze that caused the smoke to work like a low wall.  My character was prone, stationary and not firing.  I watched in Zeus.

 

In that test, the AI that could see through the smoke fired at me.  The ones that could not did not fire and wouldn't even track me.  One AI that moved up into the middle of the smoke was able to see me because the breeze was preventing the smoke from rising up into his line of sight.  As the smoke blew this way and that, the AI would start and stop firing at me, appropriate to whether the smoke was in the way.

 

So my above theory about AI telling each other where the players are seems to be rubbish, at least according to my latest test.

 

Possible explanations for why AI can hit you when you have smoke out.

 

1. You're firing or otherwise making noise that they use to locate you

2. You're moving, which the AI might be able to use to locate you.

3. The AI might perceive smoke differently than we do on the screen, allowing them to 'see' us under certain circumstances.

4. The AI that you thought shot you wasn't actually the one that shot you.

 

Note that I ran the test with the AI running on the server.  Both server and client processes were on the same machine, but they were separate processes.  I also ran this test in an editor multiplayer setup and got the same results.

 

All this said, AI do seem to get erratic when the server is heavily loaded.  They won't head out to a distant waypoint because they can't seem to get enough computes to figure out a path.  Or they're sluggish in responding to enemy fire.  And so on.  I'd be surprised if they saw through smoke as a result of server load, but if Bohemia coded it wrong then it could certainly happen.  For example, if they don't have enough computes to check smoke and just decide to skip that step then you'd have AI firing through smoke.  Or perhaps they reduce the number of smoke "puffs" that they check.  Who knows?

[Gunter Severloh 4053]

On 2/7/2020 at 3:38 PM, mickeymen said:

I began to observe how smoke grenades no longer save me. Enemy AI continues to shoot accurately through the smokescreens

The other thing to consider is that if the enemy has seen you already and then you throw smoke then well the smoke wont save you because they know where your at.

 

If you were to throw smoke without making noise, eg., shooting, squad callouts,etc,. then there is a great chance they wont locate you until you fire from behind the smoke,

ideally smoke is meant to obscure one's movement, not to hide you while your shooting from behind it. Also note that the AI can track you, once they have seen you moving in a

certain direction, and you have smoke up in front of you and you move into it, the smoke wont help you, they AI still will and if able hit you provided there are no barriers between them and you.

 

Review my AI Facts and Myths Compilation list as JB47394 linked, all the statements on that thread are from the start of the game from Alpha up to the latest update,

as well as from fellow testers, theres videos, and other linked references there.

[mickeymen 324]

21 hours ago, Gunter Severloh said:

The other thing to consider is that if the enemy has seen you already and then you throw smoke then well the smoke wont save you because they know where your at.

 

If the AI knows where I am, this does not mean that its shooting must be accurate through smoke.

Yes, he can shoot at enemy, but his shooting must not be accurate! 

 

Quote

If you were to throw smoke without making noise, eg., shooting, squad callouts,etc,. then there is a great chance they wont locate you until you fire from behind the smoke,

 

Yet I am talking a little about other things.

My expectation is that the AI will behave properly if there is a smokescreen between me and the enemy AI — the AI must shoots randomly, with very low accuracy, or the AI stops shooting at all. Two choices can be random. 

Of course I mean the distance to the target > 30/50 meters

 

And it makes no difference whether I make noise or not. This behavior would be adequate, but when the AI shoots me through smoke (from a distance of 30/50 meters or more) and kills me from the firs/third shot, I think this is not realistic

[darkChozo 133]

Just did some testing to verify: the way that the AI tries to shoot at you through concealment is that it estimates your position based on your last known position and velocity, and shoots at that "virtual target". You can see this sometimes with lock-on boxes and the red "shoot at this target" aid on lower difficulties; when a target moves behind cover, the box just keeps gliding along at the same speed, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. You can also verify this by using BIS_fnc_traceBullets to see where the AI shoots in smoke, or by tracking targetKnowledge.

 

So basically, the AI aren't shooting randomly through smoke, they're guessing at your position at shooting at that, much like a real human would. I do think this can make them "too accurate" if you just run in a straight line behind cover, because their guess ends up tracking your position almost perfectly, where a real human would start losing accuracy after a second or so:

Spoiler

 

 

But if you do anything but run in a straight line at a constant speed, they end up missing entirely:

Spoiler

 

It's also worth noting that the AI stop shooting after like 3-5 seconds, even in situations where it would make sense for them to shoot at you randomly (eg. if you're behind a smoke grenade in an open field). I think if you were to change anything, it would be to limit the guesstimate tracking to 1-1.5 seconds, but have a much longer "randomly shooting at their last position" tail, maybe for 10-ish seconds.

 

And just to confirm, I didn't see any situations where the AI could blatantly see through smoke. The only time they kinda did is where you were on the very edge of the smoke cloud, but I don't think that's necessarily unrealistic (vanilla Arma smoke grenades kinda suck...).

[x3kj 1247]

Found a player exploit, to stop AI from reacting to shots ...
please have a look at it   https://feedback.bistudio.com/T149579

[ANZACSAS Steven 395]

Been finding and have received feedback that there is some serious fps loss when AI are taking damage from fire/s.Is there a limit to what can or should be used?

It doesnt seem to be correct that even just 1 or a few AI units receiving damage can have such a huge impact on fps.It smells a bit fishy to me..:)

Thanks

[ANZACSAS Steven 395]

Can i assist somehow in supplying a test mission for you Dev's to look into?

I've been seeing this for awhile but thought i would apply a process of elimination to be more confident it was the damage values in the efx class that was causing the issue.

Just let me know if i can do anynore to help.

Thanks guys!

[x3kj 1247]

On 9/18/2020 at 12:13 PM, ANZACSAS Steven said:

Can i assist somehow in supplying a test mission for you Dev's to look into?

I've been seeing this for awhile but thought i would apply a process of elimination to be more confident it was the damage values in the efx class that was causing the issue.

Just let me know if i can do anynore to help.

Thanks guys!

Have you created a bug report on the feedbag site ? You can attach missions there
https://feedback.bistudio.com/project/view/1/

[kremator 1065]

Why are we not talking more about this?? ..... 'Added: combatBehaviour and setCombatBehaviour commands' !!!!

 

It is a HUGE improvement and needs to come out of Dev branch asap !

[lexx 1363]

I don't even understand what it does different than behaviour and setBehaviour.

[killzone_kid 1330]

2 hours ago, lexx said:

what it does different

Allows to set different behaviour for different units within the same group and set behaviour for the group itself instead of forcing the same behaviour on all units and the group

[WGP 91]

2 hours ago, killzone_kid said:

Allows to set different behaviour for different units within the same group and set behaviour for the group itself instead of forcing the same behaviour on all units and the group

Is it different to doing it via init or script.

I.e. naming U1,U2,U3 etc.

 

U2 made some nice records.

U2 setUnitSong "BABYFACE"; got a reasonable response. (or maybe that command should have been to the whole group).

[Tankbuster 1746]

The new commands, combatBehaviour and setCombatBehaviour work on individual units.

The old command, Setbehaviour works on groups.

[WGP 91]

3 minutes ago, Tankbuster said:

The new commands, combatBehaviour and setCombatBehaviour work on individual units.

The old command, Setbehaviour works on groups.

Interesting.

Not what we have found, if you name your group members and give them different behaviours, stance etc, works fine. But that is in Arma 2, not sure of Arma 3, must be different.

[Ivanoff.N 61]

On 2/26/2021 at 2:20 PM, lexx said:

I don't even understand what it does different than behaviour and setBehaviour.

Its a different thing as this only affects a unit when it is attacked. So your unit can be in aware when not attacked, and this command can force it to stay in aware after being attacked and not hide under a bush. 

With this it would be great if this would influence units i vehicles.

For example currently if a vehicle is attacked infantry dismounts as it is in combat. They still dismount if setcombatbehaviour is set to aware or safe. 

It would be a benefit if this mode would allow them to not disembark in combat (the vehicle combat dismount is still allowed).

Like this some units will dismount and some will stay in. Currently you can only stop dismount by blocking the entire section (all cargo or all turrets)

[pierremgi 4853]

There is a remaining problematic issue, when an AI takes the lead while player (former leader) falls unconscious.  The AI's order ruins all previous strategies, most of the time ordering AIs in group for disembarking (even if the gunner(s) have the most powerful armament!).

Imho, the player unconscious state remains poorly implemented:

- AIs leader is dumb. This handover should be reworked, or, at least, the disableAI command should avoid stupid order (no order at all!)

- the access to support (BI module) should be removed while unconscious

 

Here, no matter how the player falls unconscious (respawn/revive in MP) or scripted in SP (player setUnconscious TRUE).

Please consider the fact: lifeState player == "incapacitated", nothing else needed.

[UnDeaD. 82]

What i noticed about AI:

• The Falcon drone sometimes gets crazy and starts to go around in circles and increase altitude when it reaches it's waypoint. This happens when ordered to a position through the UAV terminal (on Altis, waypoint over sea, enemies in a 1.5km radius)
• Ifrit driver has a hard time reaching a waypoint after it stops due to collision/other reasons. He starts to reverse, then it looks like he is "tapping" the gas and moves very slowly. He keeps doing that for like 15-30 seconds, then he either gets stuck in a loop and does the same thing for a few more times or it starts moving normally. Hunter and Strider works fine, so i'm guessing it uses a different AI driving. I noticed the same thing for some modded vehicles, and that is probably because they are using the Ifrit's AI.

[redarmy 422]

On 2/27/2021 at 3:53 AM, Tankbuster said:

The new commands, combatBehaviour and setCombatBehaviour work on individual units.

The old command, Setbehaviour works on groups.

Glad i stick with vanilla AI i can see this breaking every AI mod to date