AI Dying In Water - Potential Bug

[jamesf1 0]

Have noticed some strange behaviour that I posted about over at OFPEC, but thought that I'd post here, too, to garner more opinions.

I've got a curious problem. I've ported over a fully-working mission I made from ArmA to Arma2, and everything works except that my objective (a pilot, who needs to be fished out of the water), dies. I've removed all the triggers, etc. that could cause the problem, but it still persists. There are two major issues:

1) The pilot (a simple editor-placed USMC 'Pilot') does not react, animate, or similar. He simply stays exactly where he is, stood up (e.g. atop the water, or even 30m up in the air, if I setPos him). He doesn't react properly.

2) He dies in a seemingly-random fashion after 5-10s... and then his body rests on top of the water/at the setPos'd height.

Update: I can't get any unit that I place in the editor to swim or tread water when they're spawned. They just stand on top of the water, and die a few seconds later.

There are no script errors in the RPT file that would indicate that any of my scripts are failing to execute properly (and, in fact, that's largely irrelevant... as it simply doesn't work with or without them).

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Update #2:

Giving the unit a waypoint of some description (of any type that requires movement, it seems), allows normal AI behaviour (i.e. he falls into the water, and just treads water after moving to the location)... anyone got any idea why?

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Update #3:

If you place the waypoint more than ~10m from the unit (or very close to the unit)... the behaviour persists. This gets more and more weird by the second.

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Update #4:

This happens regardless of who you spawn... if you spawn them on/in the water. Spawning a three-man group, where two soldiers were in the water, they both died unless they were the group leader (who 'has' the waypoints).

Some images to illustrate:

Edited June 22, 2009 by JamesF1
Added Screenshots

[IndeedPete 1038]

I think, it's a bug. Have you already installed patch 1.02?

[jamesf1 0]

Yup, am running 1.02 :)

[Tajin 349]

Why not just spawn them on solid ground and setpos them in the water ?

Sounds like a good work-around to me.

[jamesf1 0]

Why not just spawn them on solid ground and setpos them in the water ?

Sounds like a good work-around to me.

I've tried that... and it still doesn't work.

[Tajin 349]

What if you manually start the "swim"-animation for them ? Maybe that helps. Just guessing.

[jamesf1 0]

Nope, they still sit atop the water :(

[MortenL 10]

I know that the AI dies if they lay down on the beach. (leave the boat, stands in the water edge, goes prone = dead)

Dunno if this has anything to do with this problem, AI seems to be extremely bugged regarding water.

Try changing the beheavior to safe or something to try and see if that'll do anything = making sure they don't do anything in order to get beneath the water.

Might also be because their "standing in the air" works as a falling, and then they die when hitting the water 10 secs later? No idea what to do about that though.

[Alex72 1]

So leave a note in the threads asking for your help. Like the survey threads and the bug thread. Bit smarter. ;)

Alex

[jamesf1 0]

I'm not asking for help... I'm posting it for general information and to garner peoples opinions ;) I'll report it on the bug tracker when I have some more information.

[Cyborg11 10]

Yes you are right. If you place the AI on water they will die.

But if the AI jumps out from a boat or land in the water with a parachute they can swim.

[imutep 0]

Also if i stay till the knees in the water, i can't shoot. Hope BIS fix this. :rolleyes:

[Benny. 15]

try to setPos any AI, he will die if their Z offset is like 1 meter in the air, they freeze in the air since 1.02 :s

[TiGGa 0]

I can confirm. I used attachedto on a cow and after detach, while the cow remained midair, it suddenly died. Had to setpos it to the ground, but even then it is not a 100% guarantee of survival.