|
Greg McCarty -> Facts about annoying AI behavior (7/14/2001 12:23:00 PM)
|
A number of months ago, I and some others
brought this up during a discussion about
odd vehicle behavior encountered during scenario developement. One problem I had
was trucks, and other light vehicles which,
when under the control of the AI, could not be made to sit still, even with a REACT setting of 99. All too often trucks would go flying off to some urgent destination,
out of control toward the enemy in many cases. This sort of thing was obviously
disruptive to scenario developement.
Recently, while putting together another one
I got some insight into what might be causing
this, or at least what might be involved.
The behavior seems to be tied up with the
RT hexes somehow. In a defend scenario, if
no retreat hex is placed on the map, the
computer seems to be assigning an invisible
one by default in some cases. Or it might be that I have accidentally entered a 1 or 0 keystroke while in the map editor, but no RT flag resulted. This is speculation on my part; I'm just not quite certain what is taking place. I have not figured out just where the unintended RT ends up, but it is usually in a place where you dont want it to be. Now in defend scenarios, when vehicles are controlled by the AI, what the computer seems to try to do is evacuate the soft vehicles, such as trucks to the nearest RT hex. In many cases this might be desirable, but in a situation where no RT has been placed, the trucks, and in some cases light half-tracks will shoot for that invisible, arbitrarily assigned RT hex the AI may place by default. There still doesn't seem to be a clear solution, but when I deliberately assigned an RT hex for the defend side on the map, the matter cleared up
to the extent that some control over where the vehicles will direct themselves was now possible.
How did I find this? I was running a static playtest on a very fast computer AI vs AI with the speed settings in the preferrences
page at max. As the screen jumped from place to place, I would occasionally catch a
snapshot glimpse of an RT flag in one of those screen jumps. I knew I had never placed one on the map. I halted game execution, and began searching the map for the phantom RT flag. None was found anywhere. So I assigned one. When playtesting was resumed, all the trucks that
had previously run amok while under AI control, now made an orderly procession for the recently applied RT hex.
If this issue has already been brought to light, then please ignore the post, and clue me in as to what has been learned. I recently observed this behavior in v6.1 by the way. If this is new news, then perhaps
it will give the coders some insight as to
cause and possible solutions.
PS. No, I've not been drinking, and
yes, its the damnedest thing I've
seen in awhile too.
[ July 14, 2001: Message edited by: Greg McCarty ]
|
|
|
|
