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I made little video showing Operation flashpoint AI in close combat, I think their response in close combat is somewhat better than ARMA series, watch it in HD and full screen.

What response... they were all killed. Easily.

Arma 3 AI is far better than OFP was/is, has to cope with a Lot more complex environments, does much more clever things, and is more lethal.

That is far from "FAIL!!!".

Maybe you mean the lack of "panic" reaction, quick turning (from 90 degrees or more) and shooting at close enemy. Yeah, the AI doesn't shine on that, but while you shoot the one who is turning towards you, his mates are already flanking you.

If that slowish turning can and will be fixed, that would sure be great.

AI turns slow because it always tries to get a good aim on you first. "Panic" reaction should mean a very bad accuracy then.

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In Arma2 didn't we have something approximating "bounding over-watch" or am I imagining it? Anyone experienced anything like that in Arma3?

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Is it me or is the AI of the panther IFVs completely dysfunctional? They have hard time assessing the terrain and they usually just drive off roads onto gigantic slopes. Then they just slide down because the tank is too heavy.

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In Arma2 didn't we have something approximating "bounding over-watch" or am I imagining it? Anyone experienced anything like that in Arma3?

No. They definitely rush instead of slow advancement.

And the rather long-time issue with AI commander constantly giving soldiers an order to engage the enemy instead of just target them may be making it worse.

I urge you to upvote this ticket if you feel that soldiers break formation too often to chase an enemy 200m away all alone

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=11868

Also another reason for the rush issue may be that the fix from 1.63 beta for OA wasn't brought into ArmA3

The one where AIs try to engage enemies from max possible distance. Because in A3 they keep closing in point blank on enemies

Edited by metalcraze

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I like that the driving ai is a huge fan of animals, and tries not to kill anyone... But if the vehicle stops on the road, because there is a sheep or chicken standing around, and the animal just doesn't want to walk away... Then I find it a little too hardcore. The drivers should do something, like honk the horn or whatever, to make the animal run away. Or better, animals should just run away automatically as soon as a huge vehicle is driving close to them.

Right now, it is madness to place animals close to a road, because as soon as one of them is standing on the road, no car will ever be able to continue to their next waypoint.

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I like that the driving ai is a huge fan of animals, and tries not to kill anyone... But if the vehicle stops on the road, because there is a sheep or chicken standing around, and the animal just doesn't want to walk away... Then I find it a little too hardcore. The drivers should do something, like honk the horn or whatever, to make the animal run away. Or better, animals should just run away automatically as soon as a huge vehicle is driving close to them.

Right now, it is madness to place animals close to a road, because as soon as one of them is standing on the road, no car will ever be able to continue to their next waypoint.

...While ai drivers without hesitation will mow down friendly ai soldiers. :)

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Is it me or is the AI of the panther IFVs completely dysfunctional? They have hard time assessing the terrain and they usually just drive off roads onto gigantic slopes. Then they just slide down because the tank is too heavy.

They behave nicely if the behaviour is set to "safe". They use roads then and move in column. The narrow roads and steep hills are not the best terrain for heavy tanks, though. There will be some wtf?-moments. I lost a couple of tanks from my column when they tried to cut some corners and rolled slowly down the hill ..a looong way down.

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Also another reason for the rush issue may be that the fix from 1.63 beta for OA wasn't brought into ArmA3

The one where AIs try to engage enemies from max possible distance. Because in A3 they keep closing in point blank on enemies

Looks like I'm correct

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=12029

please check the repro and upvote

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They behave nicely if the behaviour is set to "safe". They use roads then and move in column. The narrow roads and steep hills are not the best terrain for heavy tanks, though. There will be some wtf?-moments. I lost a couple of tanks from my column when they tried to cut some corners and rolled slowly down the hill ..a looong way down.

The thing is, in a combat environment nobody drives around unbuttoned with the hatches open.

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The thing is, in a combat environment nobody drives around unbuttoned with the hatches open.

If they drive in neat column, staying on the road, moving from A to B, they must feel quite safe. And if there is danger on the way, the hatches close and column breaks anyway.

In combat environment (anything other than safe), they try to move a bit off road. Usually not a problem, but in Stratis... off-the-road means often down-the-hill.

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If they drive in neat column, staying on the road, moving from A to B, they must feel quite safe. And if there is danger on the way, the hatches close and column breaks anyway.

In combat environment (anything other than safe), they try to move a bit off road. Usually not a problem, but in Stratis... off-the-road means often down-the-hill.

Yes. My point still stands, AI doesn't asses the terrain with tracked vehicles well enough.

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The thing is, in a combat environment nobody drives around unbuttoned with the hatches open.

They do. Policy with the german tanks (back when my father served in the 80s" was to drive around with the hatches "half popped", so that just your eyes were above the rim of the hatch.) in the 80s was to preferably have the hatches open to improve situational awareness. With your hatches down, you immediately become blind, apart from the narrow slices that your optics can see. You can´t tell where you are being shot at from (with a modern tank like an Abrams I doubt you´d even hear the noise of rifle fire against your hull or handgrenades going off nearby, and heavier rounds hitting you would make it bang from all around.) without a sensor and help from the outside. This is why you have buddy-team systems where each tank observes what the other does, to see where they are being shot at from. Another good example from the early days of tank warfare is the Book "Tiger" by Egon Kleine + Volkmar Kühn (I believe, which I am also not sure is available in English unfortunately), where they have combat reports by crew members of Tigers all the way from the very first to the very last. There you can see that driving around with hatches open even under fire or under threat of making contact was very common, to improve communication, situational awareness and possibly to allow hasty escape from the vehicle.

You only completely button up when you are positively in hard contact, to protect against blast pressure, shrapnel and thrown weapons from nearby enemy infantry. Modern Tanks do not suffer from this as much because of their advanced sensors, but when you look at footage from Combat even from Desert Storm, you will often see them driving (even firing) with the hatches open.

I would support BI even removing the external view completely from Tanks, apart from on the very easiest difficulty, to simulate this fact. We´d also need a half-pop "turn out" option, and the AI would need to be strictly limited to only see where their sensors are pointing and where there are periscopes on the hull. You should literally be able to casually walk around behind an enemy tank when they are not looking your way.

Edited by InstaGoat

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The combat mode and behavior are carried on since OpF times, they can be improved. A waypoint params can become like this:

Actual:

Combat mode: no change, never fire, hold fire, open fire, open fire engage at will, hold fire engage at will

Behavior: Careless, Safe, Combat, Aware, Stealth

Should become:

Behavior: Offensive, Defensive, maybe Hold fire (not necessary, could be an internal command)

Only the very experimented mission designers know the difference between Combat and Aware and how AI is using cover and roads, thus this is a source of mistakes in missions design, people not using them correctly and claiming AI does not react properly. Or people reporting different behavior, maybe right here in this thread.

Once you have the AI in position, you just want it to chase the enemy or just hold the position looking for cover, you don't really have to care if he is using roads or not (most likely not), what its stance is (it should be like now, autodetect the best stance, crouch when engaging, prone if enemy close and not seen, stand if enemy far). Also, in any combat, anyone wants to be "stealth", that is redundant from external point of view, few people know that actually refer to the way they move.

The AI would also become easier to program, when in "defensive" mode they look for cover and prefer prone position, in offensive mode they chase the enemy, run and crouch to fire or get prone sometimes.

Actual mode is cumbersome, if someone creates a mission where he put the AI in "Hold fire engage at will" mode, that means that the AI will engage only after it gets shot, someone else playing that mission will claim AI is stupid.

AI should be by default aggressive, engaging the enemy when it sees him. It should adapt its stances properly, should look for cover when necessary (pretty much all the time, but not when enemy is close and in the line of fire). Careless+Safe+Hold fire+Never fire only become "hold fire" for scenario reasons, although this should rather be a command, like "disableAI"'. I imagine its a hell to program all those modes in FSM and expect a proper behavior all the time. I think the actual design makes it harder.

Edited by afp

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Not that I don't agree with all your ideas about new variations of danger mode, but I think its not even worth hoping for, for release. Unless things have changed, Ai will not be reciving any extras to their behaviour.

Of course it is still fun to talk about what could be done to make them better. In that regard, I think that BIS should start small however. For example, most objects (esp rocks and bushes) ai doesn't know to use as cover. and even those they do know, they aren't effective at using it (using correct stance depending on situation). If ai can't even handle themselves on an individual level I really think that changes on a larger scale (ie to combat mode) wont have as much effect. I mean whats the point of having the ai go into defensive combat mode and being forced to hide behind cover when they aren't aware of the majority of the cover around them. Its the low level ai thinking that needs improvement most. The squad level stuff is actually not bad, but it falls apart due to flaws in the low level individual behaviors. My opinion at least.

In addition it is pretty easy to script squad level things ie. counting up the number of enemies and friendlies and assigning waypoints and behaviors based on that isn't hard - GL4, UPSMON and HETMAN all prove that. Scripting low level things like cover finding, stance choice, rotation speeds etc, however is not and often can't be done perfectly and/or comes at the cost of performance. Just another reason I think BIS should start improving the micro ai before they improve anything larger.

Also interested to know, would it be worth it to start another thread to discuss the new ai gunshot detection tweaks? I think there is definitely room for improvement (though its better than before).

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Yes. My point still stands, AI doesn't asses the terrain with tracked vehicles well enough.

Well they obviously are not careful enough with the steeper slopes, which creates some hilarius moments sometimes.

If that could be fixed, without breaking much else and not compromising things too much, I'd be happy.

Still, for Panther, for example, the Stratis landscape is difficult with the steep hills. Other vehicles suffer too, but with the heavy ones you really have to think about the terrain beforehand. Altis is more suitable for tank battles than Stratis for sure.

But anyway, AI is still having some more driving lessons for sure.

Edited by Azzur33

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needs life lessons too by the looks of it :P ha ha

i can still sense robotic Ai lol

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The AI are fine, if your happy to patch things up. Which, if we’re honest, is always going to be the way, with the series.

Those that moan that they are not realistic, robotic, idiots etc, should go online and watch some humans trying to play this game, possibly they are the humans of which I mention here.

Soon it will become apparent that the AI are better at this than we give them credit. I can watch a 10-20min fire-fight between AI, solely AI, great fire-fight i.e. they keep at it, using good stances, movement, tactics etc, that's in Arma 2 though..

Humans don’t do this, our inability, in this game, to make good, fast decisions, tends to be the reason why many get killed. Then they say well the AI cheated, or they can see through everything.

I play with pretty good AI, have done for a long time now, thanks greatly to GL3/4 & SLX and of course the AI mods prior to those, that led to those. Also others have come along and took parts from these and improved a little, like Zeus, TPWC etc.

Its all good, breaking open a mod to see how it works is alright, improving or adding if possible even better. The player tweaking slightly to suit their own game-play is good, the idea is to do anything, if it gets you what your looking for game-play wise.

Sitting and endlessly talking about how good the AI could be, when in-fact they’re pretty good now when modded, is fun, but not really going to turn much up. BIS have a new crew breaking open the old mod’s and having a look, who know perhaps that's what they're doing, if they get some of it in as stock, then great, if not, just mod it and play.

The only problem however, is that the really talented makers of the main two AI mods have stopped playing or modding the game it seems. So it could be, pretty much curtains, for A3 for great AI. We just got to hope that someone comes along, that understands how they got it to work, so well, so long ago..:confused:;)

Or of course you can play modded A2, which is head and shoulders above A3 at present. I'm hoping this won't always be the case.

Edit:Also, are we asking the impossible, to get it better than the modded AI, can they put a patched up remedy into the game as stock. Where do we have AI like this anywhere else in gaming, one that we could use as a comparison. I don’t think there is one, certainly not as good as the modded version, patched up as it may be, it still works great.

So what are the answers to AI, I think they’ve probably been said already, a while ago. There are mods available that you can download by the kind talented people that made them, that will and do change the game for the better, even if they’re not stock, does it really matter.

The AI we have in this game, that has been added too and tweaked has no comparison anywhere in gaming, so why do we still feel cheated, when we can sit and watch human players playing it worse than ever, why would they bother to improve it above what it is already i.e. an AI that has no comparison in gaming, that is better at what it does than any other (more so when modded), that can think and perform in an open world environment and still win most of the time.

Do we really need it to go further, or do we need to bring our game-play upto where the AI stands at the moment.

Just a thought.

Edited by ChrisB

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BIS have a new crew breaking open the old mod’s and having a look,

how do you know this???

there is no point downloading modded AI for this game yet and 2bh... you shouldnt have to.

i do agree the AI has more potential then A2 already but just needs a few lessons in certain fields.

im sure BI will do everything they can... they have to be careful they do not break the CAMPAIGN!!

every tweak will mean the campaign will act different. so if it ruins the campaign then well they will have to remake it.

im sure after the release of A3 full. people will bring out mods that will extend the AI passed the point where it will affect the campaign, this will not be BI's fault as they did not make the addon.

so when people complain the campaign is fucked.. BI can say it isnt our fault you downloaded the mod.

like i said BI are doing everything they can.

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im sure BI will do everything they can... they have to be careful they do not break the CAMPAIGN!!

Im reasonably sure you will find they dont need extrernal help breaking the campaign.

What a convenient excuse you are giving them. We cant fix it because it will break the campaign. I guess that also carries over to weapon resting... actually lets keep on topic. :D

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Lets be patient guys -the fact that a BI dev opened an AI thread is nothing short of monu-fookin-mentous! The amount of years people have been asking, no begging, for some answers on AI supersedes just about every other issue and pretty much went ignored (in terms of open dialogue). The thread itself is a beacon of hope and recent updates show it is back to a higher priority.

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I'm really happy about opening thread about AI changes.I wanna kiss BI guys for that thought and work to post all changes on the forum to all us.

It's the luxury and honor to have a option to read what's going on under the hood.

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Too complex? Arma 2 says hi!

Even better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqPiMh94Xf8

I love GL4 and I've been using it for years, but ChrisB's captions in this video are very misleading:

0.35 they don't "get into cover to assess the situation" - the mod merely check's the nearest index of buildingpos and moves a unit to it, because they are in combat mode. Nothing more, nothing less. Same at 0:45 when one goes up on the roof, it's just another buildingpos in the index, the AI is not "using a higher position to check enemy numbers". GL4 is great for giving the impression that AI are doing intelligent things at a micro level - for example using buildings - but it still doesn't know what a building is or why it might be useful. Let's not attribute aspects to the mods that they fundamentally don't have.

If the mod was making the AI "smart", it would have put the guy with the MG on the roof and left him there. What GL4 is good at in this sort of situation is splitting squads and flanking.

Edited by PurePassion
please do not quote videos

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0.35 they don't "get into cover to assess the situation" - the mod merely check's the nearest index of buildingpos and moves a unit to it, because they are in combat mode.

Actually it's even worse than that. Instead of engaging the enemy they run for cover first exposing their backs disregarding any conditions unlike vanilla AI. This is an old Zeus AI bug due to a very outdated danger.fsm present there (which also allows AI to be exploited by human players to the extent where AI is harmless since they will rush for cover even when the enemy will be 10m away in front of them). In that video blufor was just lucky opfor didn't spot them first.

There's "smart" AI behavior and then there's trying to give meaning to lucky coincidences which is what that video does.

Mods can only tweak AI parameters, they can't fix the core of it unfortunately. Moving AI into buildings will in fact expose them to a bigger danger than staying outside since they are completely incapable of finding their way around there and reacting to close threats in a reasonable way.

Until BIS finally brings AI to at least counter-strike level when dealing with urban environments - no mod will help the most glaring issues. Is it really THAT hard making them navigate meshes using basic waypoints like CS bots do and react to threats instantly instead of turtle turn speed?

Edited by metalcraze

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Until BIS finally brings AI to at least counter-strike level when dealing with urban environments - no mod will help the most glaring issues. Is it really THAT hard making them navigate meshes using basic waypoints like CS bots do and react to threats instantly instead of turtle turn speed?

While I agree that CS bots navigate well, those are some pretty tiny levels and pretty sure the AI is 'baked in' from the start. Im guessing that's the reason for them using the same levels for what, 20 years...:p We'll never see them crawling thru crawlspace etc like CS bots. As far as them turning and reacting instantly -they're aimbots. I remember hanging my hat from the game forever when their 'expert bots' could detect me peeking from a window from an overpass 20ft over their heads with maybe 1 head pixel exposed and shooting me between the eyes in .001 second. This happens repeatedly.

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Buildings in ArmA3 are even tinier than CS levels. And it appears that when entering buildings AI uses completely different system for navigation than the "usual" one.

If that was fixed we could have had proper urban environments with huge hangars and multilevel buildings a la Rainbow Six levels with dangers being above and below you.

It's been 12 years and combat in ArmA3 is still too 2D if you know what I mean. Imagine finally having a real city in the game, not permanent flat villages ArmA is stuck in where putting AI on a roof sends it into uncontrollable panic and the first thing it tries to do is exit the building ASAP unless you use scripts to force it to stay there.

Does anyone really care about underwater combat?

Edited by metalcraze

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