Showing Off The AI: Viper Pass

[Webwing]

MarkEzra,

Very good!!! Only now I had the time to play it and study it a bit.

I have to say though that the merit for the attack plan is all yours and not the TacAI's. You told them exactly where you wanted them to go and what to do every step of the way. In this light you did a great job indeed.

I'm also putting together a few missions with RED Player X BLUE AI.

The editor is very robust but the Orders system is nothing more than assigning waypoints to groups and specifying the area they should occupy. So far I see three main limitations in this if you are planning an attack. For the deffender this is more than enough.

One is that the troops tend to not leave the area painted which is good if that is what you intended them to do. But with a simple way point (a point not a painted area) you would have had a general location and the AI would position the troops as it saw fit.

The second is that since this is only a variation of the waypoint system to have only 8 groups does not seem enough for you to have a detailed urban combat attack plan.

And the last is that you don’t have a trigger to say when the troops will go to the next order. There is only a timer. You can’t tell them: Go there only if you see enemy troops, for instance.

Having said all that, I am fully aware that any design decision is a trade off. This editor is slick and extremely user friendly as opposed to a more script driven editor (TOW for instance). And even with the intrinsic limitations there is loads of possibilities to be explored.

And you took advantage of them very well in this scenario.

[MarkEzra]

Thank you for your kind words. Viper's whole reason for being was to demonstrate the COMPLETE difference in scen design from old CM. I certainly agree that 8 isn't enough and that an ability to define threat level by area would be VERY cool indeed. With CMx2 in it's infancy I'm sure we'll see much growth and improvement in the AI editor. It's actually very exciting.