AI spotting question.....

[Bradley Dick]

I was playing GDog's SpecOps scenario. If you haven't played it, it's very fun and simple. During the scenario, I hit one of my own 1114's with stray rocket or something. The 1114 caught fire and had a tower of black smoke coming from it. The enemy is patrolling the entire area, and black smoke comes from an uninhabitated hill nearby. A human player would have had my ass, immediately.

My question is this:

Does the AI see smoke or dust effects ? If they do see it, can they be programmed to react to it ?

[Battlefront.com]

Good question. The two questions are actually one. If the AI is programmed to "see" something it is always for a reason. Put another way, the AI doesn't know anything that it isn't made exlicitly aware of and there is no point in coding that unless there is a reason for it.

Currently the AI is only programmed to understand units. So if it can't see the unit then it doesn't know how to respond to it, therefore there it isn't aware of smoke/dust. Obviously this is suboptimal, but when you think about the higher level thinking that is involved in dealing with something as unknown as a smoke cloud you'll probably see why we haven't tackled that one yet

Steve

[Bradley Dick]

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the response.

I can't even imagine the BS that comes from programming AI. My brain hurts just thinking about it.

[hoolaman]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Good question. The two questions are actually one. If the AI is programmed to "see" something it is always for a reason. Put another way, the AI doesn't know anything that it isn't made exlicitly aware of and there is no point in coding that unless there is a reason for it.

Currently the AI is only programmed to understand units. So if it can't see the unit then it doesn't know how to respond to it, therefore there it isn't aware of smoke/dust. Obviously this is suboptimal, but when you think about the higher level thinking that is involved in dealing with something as unknown as a smoke cloud you'll probably see why we haven't tackled that one yet

Steve

I would imagine that this sort of thing falls in the same basket as the "dust radar". There really should be a value assigned to smoke and dust for spotting (and therefore FOW) purposes. I guess this sort of involves dust becoming more like a unit than a special effect.

The hard bits would involve spotting calculations for altitude of dust to each unit.

[Battlefront.com]

Hoolaman,

I would imagine that this sort of thing falls in the same basket as the "dust radar". There really should be a value assigned to smoke and dust for spotting (and therefore FOW) purposes. I guess this sort of involves dust becoming more like a unit than a special effect.

Yup, complete with all the resource overhead associated with units. This means that a platoon of tanks moving is now equivalent to two platoons of tanks moving. At least in terms of...

The hard bits would involve spotting calculations for altitude of dust to each unit.

Spotting, reacting, tracking, storing in the save game file, etc. I agree that dust is a little too exact as it stands now, but the practical altenrative is to have nothing and that's less realistic IMHO.

Steve