Jump to content
Bohemia Interactive Forums

b00n

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    9

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Medals

Posts posted by b00n

  2. Posted

    Yep spawn might work for you here. But honestly, you're making things hard for yourself. If you just add the lines you posted to the bottom of init.sqf, which is in your mission folder anyway, it should work fine... except for:

    [100, BIS_ACM] call BIS_ACM_setIntensityFunc;

    Not sure what setting intensity to 100 would do. Valid values are between 0 (off) and 1 (max).

    [bIS_ACM, 1, 10] call BIS_ACM_setSpawnDistanceFunc;

    Are you sure you want stuff to spawn within 10 metres of the player?

  3. Posted

    I want to start by saying thanks for the agile, community inclusive patch development you guys are doing. I know I can speak for a lot of people when I say it's a refreshing change to the usual development cycles we have grown accustomed to. :)

    That said I would like to throw my support behind a post from yesterday:

    Great work from Suma and the rest of the BI group. Lots of work in improving the AI.

    But i wonder... shouldn't you work first on determine what does have more or less priority, and work before into the high priority stuff?

    For example, in the last beta patches there has been a lot of work to improve the combat behavior / formations / leader movement. Great. But there are, imo, two much more important issues at hand.

    1. AI reports: "i am covering!" "i am covering! go!" "i am covering!" "i am covering!" "i am covering!" "i am covering! go!" "i am covering!". Etc. Sometimes they really got stuck in a loop saying it one and another time.

    2. AI spotting abilities. Yeah, i know this was already worked in past patches/betas, with the ai hearing skill tweaked, bugs fixed and now the grass layer, but it is still not enough. It's not only the AI, both allies and enemies, who seems to cheat, it's also yourself! If you have activated the "contact report" in the difficulty options, you own soldier (as if there is an AI controlling the player avatar) will spot and annouce enemy contacts totally invisible for you, even if you stop and begin to scan slowly with the zoomed sight. I have the theory about it, the pixel theory: perhaps the game consider something spotted if can trace a line of sight between the observer and the object, even if it's really only one pixel of the object, perhaps seen between various bushes.

    I know this sound very whiny, they patch the AI really often these days and now i complain about the order of the fixes, they could just stop in patches and work only in their next game! We should be thankful!

    Still, I dont' know about you people, but when i play the game, i don't think "mmm perhaps the AI could go from cover to cover faster and smarter" or "the ai should respect formation better". I think "OMG i am going to punch my screen to shut up my own teammate" or "where the fuck is the enemy, i can't see shit with all this grass and vegetation, and even if i change my position, they are still seeing me and firing me, total bullshit".

    I have the feeling that the artists designed Chernarus (95% covered with vegetation everywhere!) without having considerations about the game design and the AI.

    Turin is 100% on the mark here. This needs fixed as a priority.

    I understand that the AI is getting a lot of love, and that's great, but it seems to be only in response to the few people who post here pointing out how this formation or that squad mode needs tweaked a bit to be perfect.

    Meanwhile there are a large number of people, myself and the people from my gaming community who play ArmA2 included, who almost exclusively play player vs AI co-op missions. Judging by the number and popularity of servers playing such missions I know we're not alone. Many of us simply have no wish to ever command AI and so these changes aren't of much importance.

    IMHO of much higher priority should be the issues repeated again by Turin. I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying that these issues, particularly the omniscient AI, are potentially game ruining especially for new players. Arma2 has a reputation for having a steep learning curve, and that's fine (in fact it's part of what makes me like the game so much), but when you can be spotted and killed at night, while lying in knee-high grass, by AI that doesn't have nightvision, well that's the kind of nonsense that I believe simply drives people away.

    Again, sorry if this sounds like a whine, and I do think you're doing a great job! I just think that a reassessment of priorities may be in order.

  4. Posted

    It probably spawns at the synced units position, so if you sync ACM to the player and group an artillery or an unit without presence to the player it might work!?

    I won't have the time to test yet, but let us know how it turns out b00n!

    I can confirm that this works. :) Having an AI unit stuck in your group constantly asking for sitreps is a little annoying, though.

    Couldn't you just sync it to a higher ranking soldier that is grouped with the player-group and have him with 0% presence (or maybe even setCaptive)?

    This didn't work, I'm guessing that if the unit doesn't spawn it isn't counted as 'alive' and so the ACM ignores it when deciding when it should exit.

    I also tried adding inanimate objects such as warfare buildings to the group to see if that would keep the ACM active, seems it does not.

    Seems like a properly scripted solution to keep the ACM refreshed would still be the best option... only problem is, I think that even if you can recreate the ACM when the group leader respawns, it will be a different ACM instance and the old instance will still clean up and exit, despawning all units it has created. Not very pretty. :(

    As suggested, syncing the ACM to a civ might also be a workaround but if you move far enough away from the civ I suspect you will see the units despawning as they move beyond the ACM's max range. :(

  5. Posted

    The most obvious example of the all-seeing AI I've seen was when I was simply messing about with the ambient combat module. I was OPFOR and a group of T90s had spawned. I got in one as gunner and had an AI commander and driver. I was surprised to discover that the AI would constantly order me to engage enemy units the moment they spawned, even if they spawned out of sight hundreds of metres into a forest, behind buildings, or behind hills. The AI would lock onto the target and track it until it was dead or went out of range of the ACM and despawned.

  6. Posted

    That's not quite right.

    They aren't actually sinking into the ground, just getting drawn lower. The problem is that their geometry is still in the same place it was before, so the soldier will appear to be lower than he actually is. Basically, in order to hit the head, you have to aim at the air above where you see the head - because that's where it really is.

    If the model is simply drawn lower than the actual bounding geometry, might that explain why the AI is still able to spot and kill prone players far too easily? I imagine the AI uses the bounding geometry for detection and in that regard it seems the grass layer hasn't changed anything.

    Regarding the feasibility/infeasibility of rendering 'real' grass discussed earlier in this thread: there is certainly no reason why such high quality rendering couldn't be done while in zoomed views, where there is a narrow viewing frustrum. The problem, as correctly stated, is that prone players would still be visible at distance while the grass is not rendered. The way to reconcile this seems pretty simple to me; just don't render players who are prone in grass at long distance. After all we're going for realism with these changes aren't we? You're never going to spot someone lying in foot-high (or higher) grass, barely moving or not moving at all, a couple of hundred metres away with the naked eye. You can still render muzzleflashes etc. which give their position away, and then the enemy would use their scopes/binoculars to locate and engage the hidden target.

    Thoughts?

  7. Posted

    Since the problem is that the module terminates when all members of the group dies at once, perhaps we could group something to the player that never dies?

    I wondered about that too - maybe a static artillery on the other side of the map or something? I'll give it a shot tonight and see how the ACM reacts - not sure if it spawns units based on the leader's location or the location of any group member.

  8. Posted

    Sorry - haven't read the whole 26 pages of this. :)

    I believe you can sync ACM to any object? Perhaps try syncing it to a civ (scripted so it doesn't die) or even an inanimate object? You could then move the object to where it needs to be for the gameplay.

    Well, I'd still like to find a solution to keep the ACM synced to a playable group, but thanks, your idea will work nicely for another mission I have in mind. :)

  9. Posted

    Is there any workaround for this, since I want units to be able to respawn and still have ACM activated?

    I've been looking into this too, I have the ACm working nicely and really want to keep it in my mission. The only thing I can think of is to check for/recreate the ACM whenever the group leader spawns. Haven't tested this though so I don't know how it'd work. I'll see if I can figure something out and post it here if I find anything.

×