johnnyboy

SOG AI just updated to include Point Man feature, Hip Fire and much more. Check out the Change notes on Steam for details. Will provide a few more videos for new features/changes in the next week or so, but here's an update on Point Man and Hip Fire: Edit: I just found that Scalespeeder Gaming did a nice little review of the new Point Man feature:

SOG AI purpose: Make playing Prairie Fire Campaign (or any other PF mission) fun and immersive for Single Players commanding an AI squad. Savage Game Design wisely chose not to promote Prairie Fire DLC to the Single Player market because the vanilla ARMA AI deficiencies would be unbearably frustrating for the player. These are the deficiencies that this mod solves: Vanilla Combat AI moves too slow to break contact when following player or ordered to move somewhere. This results in them being overwhelmed by the enemy in SOG scenarios. Vanilla Combat AI is too slow boarding helicopters under fire. Very frustrating for the player. Vanilla Combat AI is too slow and incapable of pushing through enemy contacts quickly. Using bomb craters as defensive positions is common SOG tactic. Craters in Prairie Fire are implemented as buildings with built-in AI paths and positions. ARMA AI moves terribly slow on building paths, which endangers the AI while moving on craters. Plus, its immersion breaking to see them slow walking. In COOP play, one player can revive another player when they are down. In Single Player mode, AI squad members cannot revive each other. It’s therefore easy to have your entire AI squad wiped out early. AI are not capable of entering Brier Bush RON sites effectively. This breaks the Ashtray III mission for AI, and is an immersion killer. Instructing Vanilla AI to place toe-poppers is a chore for the player: Select Unit, press option 6 for Actions, scroll through actions to find Put Toe-popper, etc. Micro-managing AI is no fun. Instructing Vanilla AI to heal themselves is also a chore for player for same reason. This SOG AI mod solves all of the above problems. Playing SP with an AI squad is now fun and immersive. Steam link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2812560646 Please comment and upvote on steam! Its my only reward, and this was a hell of a lot of work. Features: Prairie Fire Campaign Mission tips: Don't use the Spawn Team action until AFTER you gear up, and BEFORE you board the helicopter. Make sure you are in an open area so you don't spawn your team into near buildings or other objects. Don't play Spindown (it has AI navigation issues) Don't play Black Spear. Its a scuba UDT mission not suitable for SOG AI. Workshop Missions: If playing a workshop mission, if player has units already assigned to him, then you will not get a Spawn Team action. You will be able to command your team using SOG AI. For example, I have played some of Fubar's Recondo missions using SOG AI on his LRRPs team assigned to player. Editor Missions: Its fun to place multiple VC groups in the editor with waypoints, a tracker modules, and a player unit, and then play. Run the mission, thenchoose your team to spawn and fight it out at your favorite location. Credits: @madrussian for the "blue move" discovery (key to fast moving AI) and feedback. Remember I knew him before he became a famous legend! @froggyluv for his feedback, knowledge and enthusiasm for all things AI and immersion. @pierremgi for his slick AI Revive scripts. I started with his scripts, and have since completely re-written them for single-player and to tailor them to Prairie Fire, but he gave me a big head start. @dreadedentity for his awesome GUI selector template. That saved me some serious time! @haleks for some fun gore fx. @veteran29 for some SQF tuning tips on discord @Grumpy Old Man for getCenterPosition function @pedeathtrian for pointIsInBox function Known Issues: Don't play these 2 campaign missions: Spindown - AI can't navigate in hill-top base. You can probably play it if you wait to spawn team until after going down the road toward where you place mines. Spindown modified so that helicopter drops off team outside of hilltop bse, so your AI no longer gets stuck trying to navigate the base. Black Spear - This cool UDT mission is not compatible with SOG AI. Doesn't support Team Switch yet. Switching into other playable units can cause multiple Action issues and other problems. I plan to fix this. LAMBS Danger by default conflicts with SOG AI. But you can disable LAMBS Danger for player squad to fix this: Video Playlist of demo videos:

Haha dude. A couple glasses of wine makes me bold! I was just reminded of the Doob's Black Water song and had to do it. Catfish are jumpin'... There's more cool shit in next release that I'm not gonna preview, will wait for response

Another teaser for next update. Should be out in about a week.

Cool. I updated the profile link in discord to your latest.

@scottb613 I posted a link to your video and voice attack profile on Discord. You will likely see more yt traffic and comments on there now. https://discord.com/channels/105462288051380224/828992561783635988/1298660056316776579 Edit: I've also added Copy My Stance to the T menu in my dev version.

@scottb16 That is super cool. All the command combos you can macro together into Voice Attack make it simple to use and quite powerful. A few questions and observations: Scout ranging ahead via vanilla Advance looks very natural. Scout's forward vanilla distance from player worries me for Nam dense jungle. Seems risky to be that far from the team. Has that been a problem where you can't see him, he gets downed, and then your other AI is endangered by moving to rescue him? This affects how I want my SOG AI point man to work... Split was simply sending red and green team to 2 calculated destinations, right? Was that based on where player looking, and then choosing spots to left and right of that? Or hardcoded positions relative to player? Thanks for the idea. I want to add that to my mod. Same question on Defend. Is the utility of this a quick way to form a line defense similar to my lay dog? What actions occur on Clear Building command? Do you get nade type display on every throw? I can see how the teams mag inventory status can be useful. I think this is a great demo. Can I share the video link on PF and Arma discord, along with your VA SCO profile? The PF community relations guy Tanner would probably promote it also. Edit: I'd love to see another video of your squad control in combat sometime...

It's simple for me to add a cba parameter for adding the extra grenades and mines, so I will do that. The original intent of the extra mines and ammo was to make initial assaults or break contact as brutal as possible, with aggressive nade usage. Plus the actual SOG teams did carry maximum ammo and explosives and very little else.

@Hans(z) How does the TFF2 campaign work when you go to second mission? Are you still technically in the same mission session, but it's generating a new scenario? Or are you starting the mission again, but it remembers to go to next mission in the sequence? If you're constantly in the same mission session, then its weirder to handle.

Should be simple enough. I'll try and squeeze that in. I just added about 8 new CBA options to the dev version,. Not sure exactly what you are asking here. Currently, if mission starts without AI assigned, player can spawn a team, and then he has the option to change the loadout of each unit in the squad. If mission starts with AI already in squad, then player does not have option to change AI loadouts. I'll change that to always allow changing AI loadouts at mission start. Which should satisfy this request. In my dev version, I think I have this solved. I need to test it for FF2 though. Thanks for your interest.

Coming soon...AI Point Man feature added to SOG AI. Kudos to @scottb613for the suggestion, and his key combos that helped point the way to get this done.

@scottb613Hey man, good news. I've got a Take Point feature working well now ( in my dev version). My original failed approach was making player second unit in group and point first unit in group. But your key combo approach of "selected unit advance" steered me to a working solution. Since there is no Advance sqf equivalent command, I just send him X meters in direction player facing. And I can toggle forceWalk on him, so he can move slow and stealthy, or fast. Plus his stance copies player which also slows him down or speeds him up some. It's pretty sweet. Player follows Point at his desired distance, with rest of team following player as normal. You can stop or redirect Point's direction of travel at any time, or take point yourself at any time. Anyway, lots of testing still to do. I want your opinion: Should Point's default speed be fast or slow? Player will have an action to toggle it. I'm currently using default Slow as it makes more SOG tactics sense, but I expect players being impatient may more often opt for Fast. Since you've been doing the point man thing for awhile, what do you think? Default point speed Fast or Slow?

I just tried this running SOG AI. I pick a unit and use Vanilla 1 + 2 to tell him to advance (while in sog ai Stealth mode). He moves forward but too fast for me, immersion-wise. I'd like him to move slow, or match player speed. I guess you have to frequently stop him, or redirect him using vanilla commands, right? Also, sounds like I don't need to change anything as you seem satisfied with your vanilla commands for Scout, right? I may still work on my own version of point man if I can get him to move slowly in front of team.

Balut...yuk! Here's the code for copy my stance. There's a sleep in the forEach loop so there's a slight delay in each unit responding in sequence. [units group player,"AUTO"] spawn { params ["_units","_stance"]; sleep 1; {sleep .2; _x setUnitPos _stance;} forEach _units; }; For point man, if I simply allow setting a unit to be on a different team (say yellow or blue) so he is unaffected by other team move and follow commands, that could be helpful, right? And if so, I'd likely have him rejoin Team Green or Red if Leapfrog command given.

Haha, nice pic! Hey Scott, believe it or not, I'm working on the mod. In my dev version, I've got most of the commands working as team or selected unit specific now, where rest of team continues to follow you after you send one team to some spot, etc. Regarding the Stance commands, the command wheel has limited space, hence the cycle up or down through the stances. Not great, but I don't plan to change that. And, sadly, the most important feature you suggested (designate a Point Man), I gave it a try and couldn't get it to work right. I can make player unit 2 and Point unit 1 (but player is still group leader), and when player moves forward the Point guy wants to flit forward left and right from cover to cover while rest of team is nice and disciplined following player slowly. It looks terrible and breaks stealth immersion. I may give it some more time, but its not looking good. It's a shame, as that would be a truly cool feature.

Saigon street food. Rats compliments of Spearhead DLC.

I'm releasing a new scripted solution for forcing units to move through a set path using waypoints. This allows AI to move on surfaces or places in building that their normal AI pathing does not support. Should be very useful for cutscenes, and filling bases and towns with immersive looking AI. Download sample mission with scripts here.

@dimon That's very cool, thanks for sharing it. The "near bridge object" + surfaceIsWater is a smart detection for on bridge. That loop could be further improved to slowly align vehicle's direction with bridge's direction as well, which should help with longer bridges, and especially those without guard rails like in the Prairie Fire maps.

Thanks dude. This script will def not work for vehicles. It forces infantry animations to move infantry AI units. I'm glad the boat script is working for you. I love making little combat scenarios with that. A similar technique can be used for tanks and bridges. You need eachFrame eventhandler to continually push tank forward using setVelocityModelSpace to make that work. I did something similar for the Last Tango In Tanoa Heist mission for the chase sequence. The bandit truck the player is chasing has triggers on its straight road sections that use setVelocityModelSpace to force AI truck to go fast and make chase more interesting.

Hi Elijah. For some strange reason beyond my control, the vanilla stance commands are "stickier" than the equivalent sqf script commands. SQF commands from my mod won't reset the stance after using the vanilla stance command. The way to clear that condition is to use the vanilla Copy My Stance command. After that, they should then resume obeying the SOG AI command wheel stance commands.

Haha, yeah you need to disable that stuff. For SOG AI infantry movement control, I set the following in an EachFrame eventHandler. I use EachFrame because the game engine won't let a unit be Aware (so gun up) and combatMode BLUE (so they ignore enemies when calculating paths) at the same time. _unit setUnitCombatMode "BLUE"; // this does not make them say Hold Fire //_unit setCombatMode "BLUE"; // BLUE makes them say Hold Fire _unit setBehaviourStrong "AWARE"; {_unit disableAI _x;} forEach [ "SUPPRESSION", "AUTOCOMBAT", "AUTOTARGET","TARGET","COVER","WEAPONAIM" ]; It's possible you need to do something similar for your vehicle drivers so the driver can ignore combat pathing and just follow, while rest of team can fire weapons. If your AI drivers still want to deviate from formation under combat, then check if the engine is automatically changing their combatMode from BLUE to GREEN or RED. If so, then you likely need to constantly reset their combatMode BLUE via the eachFrame. Good luck man! I feel your AI control pain for sure! 🙂

No, I never got around to doing that.

Hi Scott, thanks for the report. I haven't updated the mod since last November, so I can't explain a behavior change unless BI made an AI change that is disturbing how my code works. That makes sense. Maybe this winter I'll be able to look into this issue, and also insure all the wheel commands can be team specific.

JBOY Mace Trap for Prairie Fire is released! The jungles of Nam just got a little more dangerous! This is not MP tested yet, but hopefully will work. Please report any bugs found in this thread. Fun release vid: Editor demonstration showing how to set up mace traps: Original pre-release teaser video: Get sample mission here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/erki8qb50f9his9/JBOY_MacePunjiTrapDemo.vn_khe_sanh.7z?dl=0 Credits: Savage Game Design for objects and voice files used in the script. Bohemia Interactive for voice files and sound fx. How to add Mace Traps to mission in the Editor: Copy the JBOY folder from sample mission into your mission folder. Include these two lines (copy from sample mission init.sqf) into you init.sqf file. // ********************************************************************** // Compile JBOY functions // ********************************************************************** _n = execVM "JBOY\JBOY_compileFuncs.sqf"; // Compile general JBOY functions call compile preprocessFile "JBOY\mace\compileMaceScripts.sqf"; // Compile all Mace functions Place a Whip Trap object in the editor. The direction you set the trap will be the direction the mace will swing. Note that AI may be inclined to walk around the trap, so you might want to place more objects on map to funnel the AI path into the trap. In the Whip Trap object's init field, put the following code: [this,'WEST'] spawn {sleep 3; _this spawn JBOY_maceTrapCreate;}; The second parameter above determines who can activate the trap. This script creates a trigger for the trap, so these are the values you canuse for this parameter: "EAST", "WEST", "GUER", "CIV", "LOGIC", "ANY", "ANYPLAYER" For a Prairie Fire mission you might want to set it to WEST so only West units activate the trap. This simulates the locals (VC and Civs) knowing to avoid the trap.

The Prairie Fire DLC has ambient talking for US aligned soldiers and VC soldiers, plus fun death screams all built into their ambient talking function. I love the VC talking and the death screams, but I don't want my US soldier AI to be talking. Prairie Fire allows you to turn off ALL ambient talking. But I want to turn off only the USA talking. This script will do just that by removing the USA ambient sound file names from the vn_sam_masteraudioarray array. Put this call in your init.sqf. [] call override_vn_sam_masteraudioarray; Create a script called override_vn_sam_masteraudioarray.sqf in your mission directory, and put this code in it: