fabrizio_t

Hello, i have a quick and simple question, as per title. Basically i need to know how to check whether some unit is being remotely controlled by a (ZEUS) player. So far i've seen that isPlayer returns false, which is something unexpected for me. Ty.

*** v0.18 FINAL Available on GitHub & Steam *** [OPEN BETA] [sP] bCombat infantry AI Mod DESCRIPTION bCombat is an ArmA 3 infantry AI enhancement mod in form of addon. It's currently Single Player only. CBA is this only requirement. The project home page is: https://github.com/fabrizioT/bCombat. bCombat aims to achieve both a more aware and human-alike infantry AI. It features an unique ecosystem, including an event-driven AI morale / skill system as well as many optional AI enhancements. Highlights: Full-featured morale system: morale affects both AI behaviour and combat effectiveness. AI will act aggressively or passively depending on circumstances. Event driven AI behaviour: any environmental events such as enemies inbound, heard gunfire, suppressive fire, nearby explosions and ricochets or casualties have an effect on AI behaviour. Real-time suppression effects: bCombat relies on (included) bDetect framework for accessing real-time ballistic information on any bullets flying by on the battlefield. Automatic (gunfire aware) stance handling: units will crouch, sprint or go prone according to situation Reduced (excessive) AI firing accuracy. Enhanced fire & movement routines AI units proactively lay suppressive fire and suffer sensible morale / skill penalty when suppressed. Increased AI survivability: better use of cover, movement and suppressive fire lead to longer firefights. Player led AI units require far less micro-management on the battlefield. Modular mod architecture: optional features may be toggled on/off or tweaked at will. Optional (toggleable) features include: Custom move to cover behaviour Mutual covering behaviour Suppressive fire behaviour Specialized suppressive / overwatch behaviour Custom fleeing behaviour Surrendering behaviour CQB enhancements Enhanced hearing: units do hear gunfire and explosions at distance Investigate behaviour: units alerted by casualties or gunfire may move to nearby places to investigate enemy presence Enhanced grenade throwing: very short to long distance, includes blind throwing over obstacles Smoke grenade throwing Automatic formation tightening feature Faster movement feature Friendly fire damage capping Custom damage multiplier And more ... All this is delivered pre-configured and ready to go, while it can be tweaked at will via its own configuration file (config.sqf). Except Steam Workshop version. REQUIREMENTS Download and install latest CBA distribution, get it from here: http://dev-heaven.net/projects/cca/files INSTALLATION It is imperative to comply with the installation instructions, in order to avoid any misfunctioning. Carefully follow instructions reported here: https://github.com/fabrizioT/bCombat MEDIA THANKS This mod wouldn't have seen the light without the efforts of the following people: FEEDBACK Any constructive feedback is welcome, as long as expressed in a polite and mature manner. DISCLAIMER The modification is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. Author is not responsible for any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damage of any kind, without limitation.

Check arma logs (.rpt) for crash info. In my case 3,5Gb of page file were not sufficient. Dunno about 7GB, since you have half of my RAM.

Crash reason? I've got quite a lot of "Out of memory" crashes on DEV recently. The reason was not DEV related, strictly speaking: game crashed because i was "tight" on space on the HD where swap file is located and ArmA3 was allocating many Gigs into pagefile, causing temporary space exhaustion. The real anomaly is the game using the pagefile so much file, as i have 16Gigs of memory, 4Gigs allocated for Arma ...

Hi harpred, not sure what you're willing to achieve there. Smoke grenades are normally used as light smokescreens or signalling devices. In the former case they usually serve as temporary concealment for withdrawal or flanking. Being simple smoke they're not intended to block incoming fire, but rather making it less accurate in order to favour a successful movement. Heavy smokescreens are not usually achieved by portable smoke devices. They're deployed either by artillery or mortars (or CAS) and they grant some concealment in case of the need for a frontal attack across a wide and barren field ( infact they were quite commonly used in WWI after the Somme). In this case the main advantage of the smokescreen is that enemy longer range weapons such as machineguns and artillery have visibilty hindered, hence they lose effectiveness. Though there's still a high chance to be spotted through blowing smoke and enemy is very likely to blind fire through it as well. So you can't expect to get 100% concealment across the field. At about 200m. i think you should be ready for fighting already.

DoStop each of them and set their direction.

I've ranted so many times about AI non being able to properly withdraw / flee over years :) It's amusing AI units still flee in formation. I agree that "stealth" mode should make AI more "stealthy", meaning avoid sprinting and idle standing / crouching when enemy is in sight. Not sure at all about the need of further / tight orders, i think micro-managing is already too much.

AI definetely improved across time. 2 years ago you needed mods in order to get suppressive fire / suppression, morale penalties impacting behaviour and accuracy, consistent use of frag / smoke grenades. Now vanilla AI provides these features. Moreover targets detection has been revised and now works better, as well as pathfinding. Sure, there are still issues, such as problems with convoy driving, firing accuracy glitches, occasional hiccups, problems with rearming and healing, etc. Yes steps were done in the right direction.

Sadly that's an issue, since setUnitpos is now overridden by core AI mechanics. Imho it does not make sense, but that's it.

Somewhat related :) bCombat v0.20 (testing) + Unsung Vietnam War Mod 3.0b: Pure mayhem.

Jungle testing with Unsung:

1. AI units will aggressively use frag grenades as well as smoke grenades (configurable via config.sqf). They use grenade launchers already in vanilla. 2. no, bCombat handles suppression already on its own.

Can't answer , but many people are running bCombat on a MP environment, pretty sure they will help.

It's optional. Should be enabled via config.sqf ( bcombat_allow_surrender = true ). May break missions / campaign mechanics of course.

Well i wrote already about vanilla having the exact same positional information as bCombat, but not happening to actively to use it ( = static AI ). However the detection scenario is something i've tested many times. Here is a sample video showing what i see: Player shoots while an enemy AI group sits about 80-100 meters away. Some AI units are detached to investigate. They move into general area of player while failing to pinpoint it. They move back to group.

Finished first testing phase on v0.20. Lots of cleanup involved, including bDetect removal and morale system tied to BIS native logic. Different visibility checks too, in order to accounf for massive foliage. A few small issues should still be ironed out, some fine-tuning should be done on balancing of features. All in all it works well on Tanoa, which is a completely different environment if compared to Altis. I'd like to rework a bit a few features. For instance i'd like to further expand the "investigate" behaviour. It does work already in v0.18, but i think some gaps may be filled between "close threat" and "far threat" behaviour patterns. No ETA as usual, work in progress.

No, you can definitely hide into houses in ArmA 3. There's 2 ways an AI unit will detect you there: 1) it has some line-of-sight on you, even just on some inches of your body through a window 2) it can hear you, meaning it's close and you're moving / making noise The potential issue imho is AI is very sensitive and accurate in its detection, probably a tad too much. This especially applies to subsequent re-detection. EDIT: To clarify my impressions: i've run first mission of Apex campaign a few weeks ago. Vanilla. I did move to some crest, was detected by AI enemies about 100 meters away and fired upon. I crawled back. Then i moved to their flank by keeping concealed behind the crest. I kept some distance too. As soon as i popped out of vegetation / crest almost at their back and at about 100 meters they opened fire on me. I was still crawling.

bCombat does not rely on knowsabout ( an obsolete command ) except for some quick pre-checking. bCombat does not cheat either, as it uses perceived enemy position as it's known by the game itself. This information is then actively used to make AI move on to investigate, something vanilla doesn't do despite having the needed info. So the point is whether perceived position is realistically given out by BIS engine. I've definitely seen issues with detection in plain vanilla ArmA3.

Sure, but not really my cup of tea. I dislike the idea of micromanaging "wrong" objects as it's not much feature/future proof.

About the AI unit not reacting: it may be the unit is "stuck", as it happens sometimes in vanilla game. Not really sure, but it seems to me (looking at the AI feet area) that another dead AI unit may intersect the alive one, this usually gives targeting problems to AI. Otherwise this kind of behaviour may be caused by heavy suppression or by fleeing, but that's hard to tell without debug info / debug balloons active. Heavily suppressed units lose courage and they may end pinned. Fleeing units have unpredictable behaviour (vanilla behaviour). --- About behaviour at long range: flanking from high distance may be questionable, however the point is that targeted units should not necessarily move or flank when targeted. Think about different situations: Are they supposed to be holding the position the moved to? Are the cleared to attack that far ? Are they able to detect ( hear, see) attacker from that far ? if you wish to experiment, you may try this and check what happens (don't know): give to targeted AI group a GUARD behaviour set them to FIRE ENGAGE / AT WILL then within bCombat config.sqf set: bcombat_degradation_distance = 2000; // let's exclude features degradation for a bigger range from player position bcombat_allow_hearing_coef = 1; // this allows enemy to HEAR shots from a distance equal to muzzle speed, e.g 800-900 mt for long range rifles. Normally it's capped to 400-500. bcombat_fire_back_group_max_enemy_distance = 1000; // allows enemy to react to incoming fire from farther, provided he detects the shooter and weapon range, constrained to his ability, allows him to take some far shots bcombat_suppressive_fire_distance = [50, 1000]; // Raises max suppressive fire distance to 1000 mt. bcombat_investigate_max_distance = 1500; // allows units to investigate way farther bcombat_targeting_max_distance = [500, 1500]; // clears units to move farther from actual position and assigned waypoint in order to chase enemies See what happens, i'm curious. All this is only for sake of experimenting as it may have some sensible computational overhead. EDIT: when targeted from 500 mt. distance and farther enemy units should still be able to move to nearby cover, unless ArmA native close-bullet detection is failing for very far shots. It could well be.

CQB radar is a complex feature, technically and balancing-wise.It sits on top of many other features, i'll give a glimpse of what's under the hood. Basically, you don't really want to have foes always identified and targeted at distance on sides or that will end up hindering flanking tactics and overall movement. CQB radar fits AI with a wide FOV ( > 200° ), but that's costrained to a low maximum distance ( bcombat_cqb_radar_max_distance = 75 mt ). There are many more contraints for an enemy to be "seen" by CQB radar: enemy should be visible (ehm ... obviously) spotter unit skill should be high enough (a bit of randomization plays here) spotter unit should not be suppressed already spotter unit should not be busy with higher priority tasks ( e.g. movement to cover, covering leader, returning fire on thtreatening units ). I'm not telling about bCombat tasks here not to giving headache ;) Please consider that even whenever a unit sucessfully detects some enemy on its side it won't necessarily open fire on it, as any enemy is conceived as target of opportunity unless it's actively threatenting.bCombat AI units won't necessarily pull the trigger on any targets, rather they consistently return fire if attacked (unless heavily suppressed) and possibily return fire on enemies threatening their leader or other squaddies. The reason being AI units have a destination to be reached (current waypoint) as well as rules of engagements ( combat mode ): fulfilling these is higher priority that brainless skirmishing. Targets evaluation is peculiar of bCombat, units are expected not to shoot non-threatening enemies in many circumstances, for example: if a unit is flanking enemies and moving at good speed it's very likely it will avoid opening fire on non-threatening enemies on sides till reaching an advantage position (or being pinned down) other enemy targets may be in sight and better preferred targets ( eg. assigned targets, enemies threatenting group leader or current waypoint ). unit may be busy with special actions (e.g. move to cover, move to heal, embark / disembark, ...) The main difference between bCombat against vanilla AI / other mods is the the balancing of movement vs. fire, whereas vanilla is "move > detect > shoot" ending up bland and static.Movement is central in bCombat as suppressive effects on morale are way higher for attacking from side / back and higher ground and this encourages playing more tactically. About grenades, they're usually overkill in bCombat. Deadly, as units may lob them over roofs for instance.However you may want to add some "virtual" grenades to units ( increase bcombat_grenades_additional_number ) and / or increase frequency by reducng timeouts ( bcombat_grenades_timeout ). You may play with distances as well ( bcombat_grenades_distance ). Keep in mind that bCombat units won't usually lob grenades at visible enemies, for obvious reasons. About the good old "pole" ( and it's brother, the bulletproof iron fence ) they're a couple problematic objects sitting there since ArmA 2.Vanilla considers them valid "cover" too. The issue is they have a large bounding box and this tricks the cover checking routines of bCombat as well. Only way around would be blacklisting of them, not really sure if worth it. About MP: it works as you noticed except for minor issues, as long as AI in local to server.

I've to say Unsung 3 is the main reason i'm actually still playing and modding ArmA3 / Apex. Great work, please keep improving it.

I've just begun testing bCombat v0.20 - "Apex", in combination with Unsung 3.0 mod. Great fun in the jungle, except for some minor issues. New version will bring re-balancing of features as well as cleanup / removal of deprecated components ( e.g. bDetect ). It will also take advantage from a handful of recently introduced scripting commands. No ETA for now, more info will follow depending on the outcome of testing.

Open config.sqf, set: bcombat_allow_fatigue = true;

Hi Tom, any chance to take a look into setUnitPos ? see ticket: https://feedback.bistudio.com/T77744#1484261 Seems to me that's almost completely ignored in combat mode.