FSM role in Arma 2?

[Doolittle 0]

FSM, introduced with Arma, never seemed to take off in my opinion. I was just curious how much FSM is in Arma 2 and will we see an FSM editor officially released from BIS??

Seeing new Arma 2 commands like execFSM, etc. makes me think FSM is all over the place now in Arma 2??

[Benny. 15]

FSMs are quite used, just unpbo missions.pbo and look at the campaigns. It's also used on some modules/ais use FSMs, Alice (Civilian Life Module) for exemple.

Unlike A1 the FSMs seems to execute at full capacity.

[Worldeater 2]

...makes me think FSM is all over the place now in Arma 2??

Right. There are five FSM files in ArmA but 889 in ARMA 2...

[DnA 5154]

FSM's are quite convenient as a visual way of scripting. Most FSM's are used for conversation flow ... like: when someone is asked A, then respond B, etc. Yet other FSM's are used to visualize anything else with a flow, like the flow of a mission / scenario.

[CarlGustaffa 4]

I remember with horror trying to dissect these manually with Arma1. If FSMs are now considered an important way of getting some stuff done in a nice fashion, will there be official tools to read and write these files in a non cryptic fashion?

If there are 889 FSMs in Arma2, I'm guessing BIS didn't use UltraEdit to create them? :)

[lwlooz 0]

Hello,

I can't afford to get the game at the moment , so I am unfortunately not able to test these myself , but out of interested I was wondering:

1. How often does the engine/game check on a running FSM executed with execFSM/doFSM/commandFSM(in Arma2)?

If it is every frame , is there going to be a way to set the time waited between checks for each state in the future?

2. On the somewhat related matter of config native FSM used for the AI, namely the formation.fsm [should be in the config section of the forum I know :o ] .

Could we get some information on the conditions and actions we can use there this time?

I see how I could modify it if I had some more options there , namely for checking if the AI is lead by a human.

While we are at it , I still believe the whole buddy system/bounding overwatch/provide cover and other fantastic stuff the soldier AI does should probably be moved over to the squad/colorteam AI [with somewhat of a formation.fsm] , it giving the individual soldiers the orders to "Cover","Stop" then.

And the soldier AI does only do "Follow Orders","Go to Cover","Fire","Spot Targets","Perform Action" in that order of priority internally.

That would help a lot with removing the awkwardness in leading AI that was introduced in ArmA ,

but to if I could set up a different FSM path when then commander of a unit is a human , perhaps I could fix it myself.

But I could be majorly wrong in assuming how it works. Documentation needed :).

3. Yes, do we get an editor ? :).

Edited June 19, 2009 by lwlooz