AI motorized collumns travelling on roads...some general remarks.

[cadmium77 16]

The APCs travel fast in lines quite nicely. They can get tangled up taking perpendicular corners but basically they're a big improvement.

http://i.imgur.com/M2Gjk1l.jpg

The various cars do the same, both Iranian and American.

And helicopters fly in tight formation too and generally the AI pilots are vastly improved.

The big transport trucks the Zemak and the HEMTT however are terrible. You can't even place them on the roads in the mission editor and then have them turn up where you put them; the appear off the road on their sides with their drivers abadonding them. They don't pathfind well at all. And no wonder. I just tried the Zemak and it's terrible to drive. l

This is a minor flaw but this is a beta so that's my bug report.

Other than that I'm loving it.

Edited September 3, 2013 by Cadmium77

[clydefrog 3]

They still seem pretty dumb to me e.g. just turning off the road randomly sometimes. Also if I put a Kamysh at the back of my convoy it repeatedly smashes into the vehicle in front of it every time it catches up after it stops.

[joschaap 1]

The trucks and HEMTT's indeed need to go back to 'NATO drivingschool..'

HEMTT's tend to get stuk into trees in corners alot and trucks cant seem to follow roads correctly, even in LIMITED speed

as far as the road-raging kamysh is concerned, does this also happen if you set speeds to limited?

[clydefrog 3]

Yeah, I was doing it with limited speed but it does it in full and normal speed too. It also just turns and drives off the road sometimes and stops, like the driver fell to sleep, and sometimes goes to turn off onto another road even though its waypoint is to carry on, basically it's rubbish. I get the same thing with the Zamaks too, they also just turn off the road randomly as shown in your video.

Edited September 3, 2013 by clydefrog

[liquidpinky 11]

UGVs are pretty bad at cutting corners too, they seem to think they are travelling faster than they actually are and corner too soon.

They also tend to sit too far off to the right of roads and clip fences, telegraph posts and walls all the time.

[thx1137 10]

Are you setting they waypoints behavior to SAFE and making sure the group of trucks Ranks are ordered in descending order? If I do those two things my convoys work ok. They do have problems with some corners causing a bit of reversing and mucking around but they get where they needed to go without much of a problem.

[clydefrog 3]

Are you setting they waypoints behavior to SAFE and making sure the group of trucks Ranks are ordered in descending order? If I do those two things my convoys work ok. They do have problems with some corners causing a bit of reversing and mucking around but they get where they needed to go without much of a problem.

I don't set the rank. I basically just spawn a group of vehicles using bis_fnc_spawnvehicle and then assign the group waypoints, and that's all you should need to do. I also set the driver of each vehicles skill to 1 although I read the other day that bis_fnc_spawnvehicle actually does this by default. And your vehicles won't get where they need to go without a problem when one of them stupidly turns off the road/drives half on the road and half off it and hits one of those random car wrecks right on the roadside like mine did the other day, and it never even tried to get back on the road afterwards.

Edited September 3, 2013 by clydefrog

[kremator 1064]

I know that the vehicles have a 'look ahead' function, but what IS needed is that vehicles following a vehicle in front need to 'look ahead to their look ahead' and slow down and let first vehicle manoeuvre properly in corners!

Then only when the first vehicle is clear, they attempt that same corner.

But for goodness sake, make drivers aware that if the wheels are turning AND THEY AREN'T MOVING they are stuck and need to reverse a bit!!!

[joschaap 1]

todays DEVBranch changelog:

03-09-2013

EXE rev. 09704

Size: ~334 MB

Drivers have been re-trained to keep on roads (road network optimizations yesterday caused this to break)

[thx1137 10]

Should is the operative word! If that issue is reproducible I would send it off to BIS if you haven't already.

It is sort of funny watching them reverse and untangling themselves and in my case they successfully got back on track but it is a bit of a pain if you want them to arrive at the destination within a narrow time frame...

I setup a convoy of three vehicles and followed on a quad bike.

My Settings

-----------

Difficulty: Regular

AI trucks skill: Full

Waypoint behaviour: Safe, Careless (I don't think there was a difference using either)

Speed: Default, Limited (I don't think there was a difference using either)

Here are my observations:

1. Hard turns, especially to the right cause lots of issues. They try and turn too early it seems. Left turns aren't so bad because the vehicles try and drive on the right side of the road. It gives them more maneuver room so less chance of hitting something.

2. If a vehicle goes off track by hitting something or avoiding something (like a civilian) then it stays off track for what I would call a road segment. IE: The next corner.

3. They get themselves into a lot of problems trying to avoid civilians. Bugger that. Make the civilians avoid them!

4. Killing a civilian that is blocking the trucks lets the trucks continue otherwise they seem to stay there a long time (forever?)

5. Following light to medium bends in the road seemed to work really well. As did the convoy slowing down trying to wait for the crashed or held-up one to catch up.

6. Minor. The path-finding seemed to work ok but the vehicles often took minor roads instead of using the main road even though the length seemed to be the same.

7. The trucks often need to rearrange themselves as though they are playing some kind of shell game. I found it hard to set the order of march. I had to see what order they wanted and manually re-position everything. In Stratis it seemed setting the rank worked. I doesn't in Altis. I could be imagining it that it worked on Stratis...

8. The order of running into things usually usually got worse the further back in the convoy the vehicle is. EG: 1 would almost always just miss hitting something (sign, building wall, etc). 2 would sometimes hit something. 3 would regularly hit something.

9. Speed limits mean nothing to them :-)

It seems to me that the road textures are not quite matching with whatever structures provide the AI path info, especially near corners. Resolution maybe?

Obviously this is not exactly a rigorous test but for me the main thing is the turning too early thing. It make AI driving in one of the wonderful towns a little too chancy!

Edited September 3, 2013 by thx1137
Testing tonights build

[clydefrog 3]

It wasn't the "road optimizations" that made them bad, they were already bad before that.

[thx1137 10]

It wasn't the "road optimizations" that made them bad, they were already bad before that.

I would presume so as it is something noticed by others before tonight.

[cadmium77 16]

Should is the operative word! If that issue is reproducible I would send it off to BIS if you haven't already.

It is sort of funny watching them reverse and untangling themselves and in my case they successfully got back on track but it is a bit of a pain if you want them to arrive at the destination within a narrow time frame...

I setup a convoy of three vehicles and followed on a quad bike.

My Settings

-----------

Difficulty: Regular

AI trucks skill: Full

Waypoint behaviour: Safe, Careless (I don't think there was a difference using either)

Speed: Default, Limited (I don't think there was a difference using either)

Here are my observations:

1. Hard turns, especially to the right cause lots of issues. They try and turn too early it seems. Left turns aren't so bad because the vehicles try and drive on the right side of the road. It gives them more maneuver room so less chance of hitting something.

2. If a vehicle goes off track by hitting something or avoiding something (like a civilian) then it stays off track for what I would call a road segment. IE: The next corner.

3. They get themselves into a lot of problems trying to avoid civilians. Bugger that. Make the civilians avoid them!

4. Killing a civilian that is blocking the trucks lets the trucks continue otherwise they seem to stay there a long time (forever?)

5. Following light to medium bends in the road seemed to work really well. As did the convoy slowing down trying to wait for the crashed or held-up one to catch up.

6. Minor. The path-finding seemed to work ok but the vehicles often took minor roads instead of using the main road even though the length seemed to be the same.

7. The trucks often need to rearrange themselves as though they are playing some kind of shell game. I found it hard to set the order of march. I had to see what order they wanted and manually re-position everything. In Stratis it seemed setting the rank worked. I doesn't in Altis. I could be imagining it that it worked on Stratis...

8. The order of running into things usually usually got worse the further back in the convoy the vehicle is. EG: 1 would almost always just miss hitting something (sign, building wall, etc). 2 would sometimes hit something. 3 would regularly hit something.

9. Speed limits mean nothing to them :-)

It seems to me that the road textures are not quite matching with whatever structures provide the AI path info, especially near corners. Resolution maybe?

Obviously this is not exactly a rigorous test but for me the main thing is the turning too early thing. It make AI driving in one of the wonderful towns a little too chancy!

I'm a noob here, so if you would do that I'd be deeply appreciative of it. I don't know the channels to go through and this place is so tightly policed it's easy to post in the wrong forum or repost something or post to a thread that's too old and get threatened iwth permanent banning. ;) I don't want that!

Also, Clydefrog, this is interesting;

"I don't set the rank. I basically just spawn a group of vehicles using bis_fnc_spawnvehicle and then assign the group waypoints, and that's all you should need to do. I also set the driver of each vehicles skill to 1 although I read the other day that bis_fnc_spawnvehicle actually does this by default. And your vehicles won't get where they need to go without a problem when one of them stupidly turns off the road/drives half on the road and half off it and hits one of those random car wrecks right on the roadside like mine did the other day, and it never even tried to get back on the road afterwards. "

How do you do the entire bis_fnc_spawnvehicle thing? Any video tutorials around on this procedure?