dnk

No prob. Happy to help however I can here. I can't code half as well as the mod makers or devs, so testing/suggestions it is. Amen.This is a can that's been kicked down too many blocks on this old road. It needs immediate and ongoing attention, and the fact that the accuracy issue can just be tweaked away means there's no reason to hold off on that issue, which is probably the #1 biggest for a lot of people. It's going to break a lot of old missions, though, but it will also fix the campaign. Players/servers can always tweak skillAI to fix any missions that get broken with a major rebalance. Again, I'd suggest taking what's currently 0.4 [edit: on novice] and making it the new 1.0, and taking what's currently about 0.2 and making it the new 0.0, stretch out the third of the current skill inbetween to the whole of the new 0-1 skill. Hope that makes sense. Like I said, there's some very specific situations where you might want something lower than 0.225, CQC and "bad snipers", but you can tweak the sniper rifle bonuses to fix that on the one end, and maybe find a way to make AI suck more at recoil management for their CQC high ROF high accuracy spray.

Tetris Febreeze?

I did some analysis to get some more data. All done under difficulty: veteran, AI: novice. [note: this seems to be 5/8ths the value an "expert" AI setting would be for each, so if you run expert, multiply your AI subskill by 5/8ths to get a similar result). All subskills set to 1.0 except aimingaccuracy. AI shooter was prone, aiming at standing target. The first shot fired from each magazine was discarded in results, since it always misses (probably a "feature"). The 650m trial used a .408 with scope (28 rounds per test). All others used a standard 6.5 MX (87 rounds per test). #REF! = Hit percentage Damage = average damage per hit (to give an idea of how many were COM/headshots - 0.65 for the MX is basically "every time") At 25m, the AI spray bullets basically full-auto. In that, almost all otherwise usable accuracy settings are superhuman at this distance. If you intend an AI to only be used in CQC, a sub-0.25 setting is suggested. A more reasonable range, this is a typical short-medium engagement. An average human player can be expected to hit 20-33% of their shots at this range without optics (as the AI had). You'll note that 0.25-0.275 is a realistic AI setting then, anything less than 0.225 turns into wildly inaccurate shots, anything much over 0.35 becomes sniper-like aim. EDIT: Note that 60% hit rate is the max possible here. This is because of certain "features" mentioned below. Any higher skill setting will still give 60% hit rates. At this range, a typical human with ironsights probably makes about 15-25% of their shots at a similar rate of fire. Again, note that anything over 0.325 becomes superhuman, while anything under 0.25 is uselessly inaccurate. EDIT: 75% hit rate is about the max possible for AI, due to the "feature" discussed below. A second test was performed (not shown) with an RCO. It seemed to have a 33% or so increase to accuracy, though the margin of error here is high. Talking just of ironsights, a human probably makes 10-20% of their shots here. Here we see 0.3-0.325 being most accurate then. However, a human with an RCO will probably make over 50% of their shots at this range. Of course, this is unrealistic for the human if in combat. Given that anything higher than 0.35 makes the AI impossibly good at any lesser distance, and a 50% accurate AI at this range would be incredibly unfun to deal with, probably it's not worth it to go higher. The damage per hit is higher for the higher caliber, of course. I would guess a human with good optics might make 1 in 4 shots here. Again, that range is 0.25-0.325. Note the legend is inverted compared to where each plots on the graph. This graph below is hit%, not damage, for each skill setting. First, you'll note the bump at 200m. It's not statistical noise. It's a "feature". The AI will often start a round of shots by aiming to the side and slowly correcting towards the target. This happens maybe 1/3rd of the time. At 25 and 100 meters, the rate of fire is higher, while the speed of shot correction for this "feature" remains constant. As the rate of fire lowers for 200m, fewer shots are placed while the AI does this little "feature" correction. This "feature" created a good bit of noise into the data. Setting the AI level just to "normal" made the 0.3 skilled AI at 200m near-perfect accurate, scoring 75% hits. It's highly suggested that server owners and SP players keep AI set to "novice" or something near that or even much lower, to account for other mission makers' "differences of AI skill opinion". Overall, at novice settings, an AI set to 0.35 aimingaccuracy will be an "elite" soldier. One set to 0.325 will be roughly "decent human". One set to 0.30 will be "moderate human". 0.275 is "weak human". 0.250 is "lol noob". 0.225 and under is probably only to be used for CQC-only AI or long-range snipers with good weapons/scopes. Anything over 0.35 is ridiculous and should be avoided. Testbed: (props to Kronzky for the firing projectile tracing, not really needed but nice to get a good visual estimate of things) https://www.dropbox.com/s/1rktqgkqcqlfu4x/AI%2520Skills%2520Testing.VR.zip?dl=0 If you want to figure out how to set up your own server's AI skill settings, you can find what the AI in your missions usually have their subskills set to, then use this to adjust to fit your taste. Use the scrollwheel action "finish" when all 3 magazines are used up to get the hit % and damage/hit results (doing it earlier will skew them). I suggest 4x time, and to clear lines every 15-30 rounds to keep FPS up.

Oddly, I've tested more tonight, and the values are behaving differnetly. It's back to .25-.30 being best, with 0.05-0.10 being uselessly inaccurate. Don't get it, oh well. Either way, everything past 0.30 is practically "super marksman" level stuff, while everything under about 0.20 is "useless idiot". EDIT: figured it out. EDIT: nope. Here's a link to the mission (based on someone else's work posted on Armaholic, just modified for strictly AI testing. Forget who made the original, sorry, I'm sure someone knows, it wasn't that obscure). https://www.dropbox.com/s/bz9hext8320o1cy/TargetRange.Stratis.zip?dl=0 So you can test for yourselves. Just edit the values in the soldier's unit in the editor.

Agreed. Also, I'll mention another biggie: AI suck at micromovements. It seems they're still on a placement grid with a resolution of about 1m. Trying to move them anywhere really specific is flat-out impossible. I have never seen this in another game. At least a few issues probably boil down to this huge issue.

Walking pace is fine. Are you sure you're actually using walking speed? Weapon sway is fine also. The resulting accuracy is realistic. Humans don't have laser aim in reality. If you want that, there's BF4/CODAW that aways.

In that video, it was 0.25 roughly. I didn't use mods.I don't play SP anymore, specifically because the AI is so frustrating to deal with. I don't make the few coop missions I do play. If I were to make a mission, I'd set it between 0.025 and 0.10 skill for the three aiming subskills, with an average soldier being around 0.05 probably. The other skills need to be a lot higher, though.

I can't compare to OFP. I've played it, but not much, just enough to get a taste after I learned about A1, to see if it was a good series. I started on A1 basically. Driving AI was definitely better in OFP, I'll say that. It's horrendous now. I do not understand how you can go so far backwards on something that, for as far as I can see, shouldn't have changed at all. Accuracy is a huge issue, and something I've been complaining about and trying to give constructive feedback on for years, I think. I have little hope of it being changed before A4, or thereafter really. Tactics are somewhat better now, compared to A2, maybe not OFP. Lots of stupidities persist from A1, though. AI have never really figured out cover, probably because the devs have never really tried to overhaul the way they find it. It's always script changes. That said, the scripts have changed for the better, but that still hasn't led to an AI that looks, to the player, a whole lot better than in A2 or A1, to some it's worse since the #1 most obvious traits are both their ability to snipe anyone anywhere with 2 shots, and their inability to spot obvious targets and ability to spot impossibly concealed ones also. I have no clue what it's going to take for BIS to fix the AI in this game, I have low hopes. Given how long hyper-accurate AI have been an issue, and how that's only gotten WORSE since alpha, given it's such an EASY FIX - a damned TWEAK nothing more... I just play PvP mostly now, and do coop when I want something slower with more teamwork, even if it means a very frustrating and unconvincing experience with the AI.

Yeah, I was talking about 100m accuracy, which should be about 20% by that chart, which is about what it is for PvP humans I think (so, good job on getting HUMAN accuracy/mechanics accurate BIS!). For a "middle of the road" AI (0.50 skill), it's 100%. Usually, they have a first shot which always misses wide. Seem scripted/bugged. Occasionally, they'll start a few meters to the side and move each shot a foot towards the target until they hit, which reduces it from 100%, seems clearly buggy. Other than those two buggy exceptions, the AI is 100% accurate COM at 100m down to about a 0.05 skill setting. Also note that cop statistics put hit rates at around 20% in <5m engagements, so I think that chart's off somehow (it's just range shooting). Combat shooting should be less accurate than the chart states.

Very grim. There's no reason for any AI to have the aiming/speed shooting skills a current 0.5 AI has. Even 0.25 AIs are probably "more accurate than ever possible". Honestly, a 0.25 AI is more accurate than a human. Here's a video of a 0.25 skilled AI at 100m with a 7.62 rifle: With the exception of the really odd first shots which always go to the same place way above the target (???), almost every single shot lands within like 0.1 MOA, dead center at the top of the torso. Show me one human that can maintain similar groupings at that rate (2/sec), nevermind at 20FPS. You know, I'm accurate myself, but even this is way beyond me. A lot of my shots hit lower torso or arms, and in a fast-paced game against humans, I'll be lucky to get 33% hits anywhere on the body, nevermind the 85%+ the AIs get. With a 7.62 it might take me 20 rounds to down someone if they're moving, and I'm no slouch. Maybe 40-50 if they're behind good cover. AI gets it in 2-3 every time. It's ridiculous. They have laser-aim on the top torso. If you're crouching/prone, half the time that works out to a headshot. If you and the AI are both on flat ground, though, the AI prones and suddenly they can never hit you. Why? No spread to their aim, it's all going just under the head, which means they hit the dirt every time. Try it out in the editor if you don't believe me. How many headshots have we all gotten from AI? This is why, if they have any angle on you and you're crouched/prone, their aim intersects your head, and they hit 95% of their shots dead-on, so you get one-shotted every time. How often are you "just wounded" by AI, like lightly, an arm wound or a foot? Never, right. Because even 0.25 AI are insanely accurate at COM shots. How many times are you just wonded by humans, though? Constantly. On average, we can't aim for [turd pies]. There's practically NO DIFFERENCE between a .25 AI at 100m and a 1.0 AI at the same. For aiming, you have to push out the distance a lot more to see any appreciable distinction. *** After further testing, the best AI aim settings are 0.20-0.30 for aiming subskills. Spotting skills can be 1.0 and still suck. [edited 12/21] That's ridiculous. The current AI aiming skill curve looks something like this: When it should look more like:

I just have to say, the AI is still way too accurate. I mean this in the sense that the AI shouldn't be able to be as accurate as it is able to be now, nor should higher difficulty settings up it so much. Another poster said about a 0.3 for aiming was best, and my own testing in the past (before the enhancements) agree with that. 0.25-0.35 is actually pretty accurate, more than a lot of human players even. And then a lot of missions end up with 0.5 or 0.75, which is impossible, even for the best-of-the-best humans, both to mimic and to reasonably survive. The whole scale still needs a total overhaul, with the current 0.2 being like the new 0.67. I can't help but think this, along with other AI failings, is what has all but destroyed coop. With a few big exceptions (7th cav mostly), pure coop is dead. In A1/A2 there were way more servers doing coop. Of course, that was pre-wasteland/DayZ, but you'd expect there'd still be a lot of those players around, yet I look at the lists now and what is there? 100 or so players on coop on a good night and 1500 on PvP every other. I used to love coop, but getting headshotted at 150m constantly gets old quick, and having done tons of PvP in Arma, I know the AI are ridiculously overpowered in ability compared to human aim.

MP LOBBY SCREENS HAVING THE SERVER NAME. I have played a lot of KOTH/BP, and each has like a dozen servers, and I can't always remember which I joined. There's absolutely NO WAY to tell once you're in the lobby or game. This is just a ridiculous oversight.

Yes, STALKER series certainly gets my vote for better AI, especially since it's equally easy to tweak, and there's been equally good mods put out to improve upon it.The big difference is that, while the STALKER AI might not be quite as tactically competent as Arma's at large-scale combat, they at least appear human most of the time. A lot of that has to do with animations, okay so be it, but the fact is they don't just stand motionless, but are usually moving, even if just minutely. They aren't nearly as robotic, though they can be quite stupid, like making a conga line into an obvious killzone. The animal AI is also quite appealing. Also the fact that, Misery aside, the vanilla AI have realistic aiming and spotting abilities is a HUGE PLUS. Again, I'm not talking about the tactical quality of the AI. I don't think that other games do it better in that department, certainly not at this scale/openness. Another series I think of is Splinter Cell. Obviously, the AI have less to worry about there, but again it's not tactics so much as appearance. The Splinter Cell bots all look, feel, and sound HUMAN. Their detection isn't just on/off. They investigate, they react to potential sightings of an enemy differently from definite ones. If you shoot at them, they don't just stand around sucking their thumbs or walking in circles slowly, or conversely immediately spotting and sniping you at 400m with a 4x optic. They don't just get stuck in one pose, without moving, or scanning their heads robotically, as soon as you set them off. I don't need Arma's AI to be human in thought. I don't need them to be able to figure out the best way to flank my position or to be stealthy or to use concealment intelligently to flank unseen. That's probably beyond the average CPU's ability given the rest it's assigned to do in this game, and I'm mostly content with their current abilities, certainly when modded. I just want them to not be obvious robots with obvious "switches", like how a player is totally invisible beyond X meters and then suddenly is instantly visible within it, or with inhuman movements, or inhuman accuracy and spotting ability (and on/off at that, with seemingly no intermediate steps). It's like they see a flash in the distance. A human-like bot would "think", "oh, is that an enemy, or perhaps a friendly, or just a civilian, or a bird with some tinsel in its beak?"; the current AI goes "ENEMY ACQUIRED, RANGE 500m, FIRING... DEAD. 0.652 SECONDS BETWEEN SIGHTING AND KILL, GOOD JOB. RETURNING TO NORMAL STATE. STANDING AND TURNING. WALKING IN FORMATION. SPEED 5MPH. ALL CIRCUITS FUNCTIONAL." You know, it's either AWARE or COMBAT, nothing in between, no spectrum.

Absolutely. How hard is this?

Definitely the weak/superhuman AI. It makes coop a very painful and unrealistic experience. For a game that prides itself on being a sandbox with a strong coop base, the miserable AI situation is disheartening to say the least. I don't see a major improvement anytime soon, since that coop focus has totally shifted in the community towards PvP. Though I think a lot of that comes from the shoddy AI and lack of a suitable coop option therefore. The AI was sufficient in 2006, but it just looks heavily dated and cheaty by 2014 standards. They STILL can't balance AI accuracy out of the box to be reasonable. I play coop often enough, and the second difficulty settings go past novice the AI become 99% accurate headshotters. That's the most frustrating. But the fact the AI still look and feel like cheap automatons is the worst of it, since at least accuracy can be tweaked by mission makers (though it seems few can be bothered to set the params reasonably). If I compare the look/feel of Arma AI to those in other FPS/etc games, it's just depressing. "Clunky" doesn't begin to explain it. At some point making the AI at least LOOK human in behavior is more important for immersion than making them ACT human (though having human-level shooting abilities shouldn't be this hard). By that I mean they don't need to be tactical masters (mostly that should be the mission maker's priority or ZGM's), just the way they move should not be like a 1950s robot. These bots need a major reboot/overhaul, and the current stabs at it just aren't satisfying that.

The people working on performance (coders/programmers) are not the same people working on animations (animators).Or do you think the dev team is just 20 jack-of-all-trade types who wander aimlessly between tasks as it suits them?

Thanks.Unfortunately, that requires the scenario makers to include it.

Damn, those are amazing. I really wish we had something like that in this game.

Is there any way for clients to know the server FPS or have it displayed easily? This would help, I think, in knowing when a server was overloaded for most players.

Thanks.

Good to hear, but still. Sound engine is saddening.

CSAT + carrier rigs. Obvious reasons being obvious. Also best urban camo.

nvm..

Wait, 5.1 doesn't work anymore? I'm getting a new soundcard, for positional audio cues mostly (SBX). I know EAX stuff is already out of the question for A3, but is this going to not even give me any of the positional cues either now?

Quick question to the non-devs: Currently (stable), what are fairly realistic AI accuracy settings? Something that puts them roughly on-par with human players (accounting for the players being non-PvP twitch-gods)? I could do 1 hour of testing, but I figure some here have gone through all that already and can quickly relate their experience.