Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Fury on November 07, 2009, 10:19:30 am
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This mod has been discontinued and replaced by Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius 3.6.12 Feature Pack (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=68214.msg1347074#msg1347074).
I created new AI profile and six custom AI classes for Blue Planet: War in Heaven. You can now try it out and give feedback to further improve it.
NEW! Now works as a launcher selectable mod and all but training missions of FS2 campaign have been modified to use custom AI. Enjoy!
Download custom AI (http://www.mediafire.com/?celdzthwtzh)
If you used older versions of this mod and extracted contents to FreeSpace2\mediavps\data, don't forget to delete following files from mediavps:
notes.txt, AI - Apocalypse.fs2, AI - But Hate the Traitor.fs2, AI - Into the Lions Den.fs2, ai.tbl, ai_profiles.tbl and turrets-obt.tbm.
Readme.txt
ai.tbl contains six custom AI classes: Rookie, Veteran, Elite, Wingman Rookie, Wingman Veteran and Wingman Elite.
ai.tbl contains most settings that affect behavior of AI pilots and overrides any values in ai_profiles.tbl.
First three are "normal" AI classes intended to replace retail AI classes for fighter and bomber class ships. I advise against using these AI classes in capital ships unless you know what you're doing.
Wingmen classes are special classes designed to not scale with difficulty level, meaning their performance should be consistent regardless of selected difficulty level.
ai_profiles.tbl contains global AI settings that are used by all AI classes, including retail ones. Most, but not all gameplay affecting changes affect turrets.
turrets-obt.tbm contains a flag to enable turrets on fighters and bombers to pick targets on their own instead of firing at pilot's current target, like capital ships do.
This table is completely optional and can be skipped if you don't like independent fighter/bomber turrets.
These tables do not have any effect on missions that do not make use of this AI profile and/or these six custom AI classes.
You need to edit existing mission(s) to use this custom AI, or create your own. Exception to this is turrets-obt.tbm, which is always in effect if it is in tables folder.
Included are all but training missions from Mediavps 3.6.10 patch that have been edited to make use of custom AI profile and AI classes.
This custom AI was not created for retail campaign mission balance in mind, these missions are only there to show how this AI performs in various situations.
To play these missions without issues, you need the latest mediavps, including patch.
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=65038.0
Last but not least, to use these tables you need 3.6.11 nightly build 5641 or newer, older builds or 3.6.10 won't work.
While not required, it is highly recommended to use 3.6.11 nightly build 5720 or newer to get fixed countermeasures.
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=173.0
The easiest way to try this AI mod, is to extract contents of this zip-file to your FreeSpace2 folder, then select CustomAI as your mod in launcher.
When you have this selected as mod, missions containing in the zip-file replaces those in retail or mediavps and you can see custom AI in action.
Optional semi-newtonian flight model with gliding now available to retail FS2 ships. This should be used together with custom AI for AI to make proper use of it. Based on SushiGlide mod by Sushi. To use gliding, please see control config in-game. To install, install custom AI mod first and then extract contents of this mod to FreeSpace2\CustomAI\data.
Download semi-newtonian flight mod (http://www.mediafire.com/?w25j5zytndj)
If you had previously extracted contents of this mod to FreeSpace2\mediavps\data, don't forget to delete following files from mediavps:
newtonian-shp.tbm and velindc-sct.tbm.
Above download links are always the latest. Trouble opening 7z-files? Get 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/).
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Having done some testing on this initially, I have to say that it makes playing the game seem more fun.
The AI is more 'alive', it's motions more fluid and it doesn't deadlock in on a target regardless of what ever else is going on, at least not that I noticed.
The AI is more evasive and less offensive, it's a much more exciting way to go about playing with them, makes it seem much more like a proper furball you might see in a sci-fi movie than just a duking fight between ships in a game.
I've said this and other people have confirmed it so I'll say it again;
I personally find this AI slightly easier than SCP AI - However, it may be more difficult to other people (evasive flying is just target practise for me), there is a marked difference in the behaviour and personally it's very much for the better, consider it for your mods if you have a lot of fighter action (I haven't tested bomber changes yet).
Also, ships that use glide handle (AI wise) significantly better with these tables.
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Hooray!
Feel free to grab the War in Heaven AI stuff and use it for your own mods. Rising tide lifts all boats and whatnot.
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Hooray indeed. :)
Fury, I probably should have mentioned this when you were showing me these over PM, but I'll put it here since it's generally useful information that applies generally. Sorry I forgot about it.
You have to be careful with the Friendly/Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale parameters. If they're less than one, the AI can actually fire faster than is technically allowed by the ship (faster than the player). In some cases, this may be the effect you want, but it's something you definitely want to be aware of: setting those lower than 1 means the AI will "cheat" and fire faster than it should be able to.
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That could be useful. :nervous:
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If they're less than one
Oops, chalk that up for my misinterpretation. Will fix it to next AI update.
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New edition now linked to in the first post. QuantumDelta says it's better than the first one, so hopefully you will have similar experience. It also now includes three missions from FS2 campaign to make use of new AI.
Edit: Don't forget to read notes.txt in the zip-file if you haven't already.
Edit 2: Comments would be much appreciated, it'd help to tweak this AI further. :)
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You have to be careful with the Friendly/Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale parameters. If they're less than one, the AI can actually fire faster than is technically allowed by the ship (faster than the player). In some cases, this may be the effect you want, but it's something you definitely want to be aware of: setting those lower than 1 means the AI will "cheat" and fire faster than it should be able to.
That explains why a couple of Nephilim was able to screw up my herc with their tiny turrets :p
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As I wrote in notes.txt that was included in the zip-file, I recommend keep using retail AI classes in turrets rather than these custom classes. The custom classes are for pilots, not turrets. In missions I included with ai_v2.zip, turrets still use retail AI classes unless you have changed them manually. In the first AI edition I did not include any missions, so you probably had changed them yourself, assuming they in fact used custom classes.
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Maybe it was a custom mission that used this profile.
IIRC turrets inherit ship's AI class unless stated otherwise, so it's an easy thing to oversight.
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Maybe it was a custom mission that used this profile.
IIRC turrets inherit ship's AI class unless stated otherwise, so it's an easy thing to oversight.
Yeah, and even IF stated otherwise, as far as I can tell by looking at the code. :/ Turret/subsystem AI classes don't appear to do anything based on what I see in the code, although I thought I remember someone saying they COULD see a difference. I dunno.
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Isn't there a ROF difference? It might've been a placebo thing, but I could've sworn I observed such a difference, at least in flak turrets.
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IIRC turrets inherit ship's AI class unless stated otherwise, so it's an easy thing to oversight.
Changing pilot AI does not affect turret AI and vice versa.
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My mistake was to change the AI class for fighters and bombers in the ship table. There turrets inherits the AI class. What I should have done is modifying the pilot class manually in each mission for bombers.
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Isn't there a ROF difference? It might've been a placebo thing, but I could've sworn I observed such a difference, at least in flak turrets.
All I know is that I've looked at the code several times to see where the turret AI class set in FRED affects anything at all, and I consistently came up with nothing. A rigorous experiment to determine The Truth is on my TODO list: probably having one ship with two otherwise identical laser turrets with different AI classes set should be enough.
I brought this up also on SCP Internal: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=65611.msg1309366#msg1309366
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My mistake was to change the AI class for fighters and bombers in the ship table. There turrets inherits the AI class. What I should have done is modifying the pilot class manually in each mission for bombers.
Indeed. But that hints at two things as far as turrets are concerned.
1) Turrets do use $Friendly AI Fire Delay Scale and $Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale flags set in AI class.
2) Class index may not affect turret ROF as $Autoscale by AI Class Index was off.
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FUBAR discovered an annoying bug in ai.tbl.
12:34:55 <Fury`>: FUBAR
12:34:59 <FUBAR>: yea
12:35:09 <Fury`>: what's this about ai.tbl going bonkers when adding more than 10 classes?
12:37:33 <FUBAR>: From what I can tell the game allocates memory for 10 classes. If you use more it adds them in blocks of 10. Something is happening and the 11th entry causes weapons to start firing from out of range. It seems to get worse the farther down the table you go. So while entry 11 fires missiles with a range for 1600 at 2800 entry 21 might fire them at 3600 and entry 41 just fires at any range.
12:38:03 <FUBAR>: Guessing this is why the Minbari fighters always fired out of range as well as they are in the second group of 10.
12:38:53 <Fury`>: oh ffs
12:39:41 <Flaming_Sword>: ...
12:39:44 <Fury`>: this is serious bug
12:39:50 <Fury`>: is Sushi aware?
12:39:55 <FUBAR>: yes and no
12:40:24 <FUBAR>: yes it's serious and no Sushi doesn't know. I think this predates Sushi's chagnes though but need to do some testing for that.
12:40:31 <Fury`>: are only secondaries affected or is there other weird behavior?
12:40:57 <FUBAR>: Primaries as well but not to the same extent.
12:41:09 <FUBAR>: Not sure on other behavior
12:41:30 <Fury`>: so THAT'S why battuta always complaina AI firing beyond their weapons range
12:41:47 <FUBAR>: possibly
In my tables posted in this topic, this bug would affect Wingmen AI classes. But apparently classes from Coward to Elite are safe.
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So I was messing around with these ai changes and was wondering about 'Chance AI Has to Fire Missiles at Player'. The wiki has nothing on that. Higher value means a higher chance the ai will fire missiles at the player?
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So I was messing around with these ai changes and was wondering about 'Chance AI Has to Fire Missiles at Player'. The wiki has nothing on that. Higher value means a higher chance the ai will fire missiles at the player?
More or less, the number is the chance out of 7.
Bug Wanderer for more details, and see if you can get him to document it properly on the wiki. ;)
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That tells me enough, thanks :)
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Lack of feedback makes me a sad bunny. :( My main reason to release this custom AI to public was to gather sufficient amount of feedback to balance it properly for all difficulty levels.
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Lack of feedback makes me a sad bunny. :( My main reason to release this custom AI to public was to gather sufficient amount of feedback to balance it properly for all difficulty levels.
i've created my own AI based on yours, i'm still testing certain things but in general it feels like the A.I behaves more 'natural', it feels more like humans are flying.
So yeah, I for one really like your AI.
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I'm waiting for some issues in trunk to get sorted out, including AI afterburner use, and then I was going to give it a shot with FotG. Sorry for the wait but I didn't want to sift through a hundred issues with broken builds right now just to test it out.
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I played both FSPort and FS2 with a slightly modified version of your AI and I admit they are much more natural, as everyone says. On the other hand their behavior is still close enough to the original behavior to not break missions nor modify their difficulty big time, excepted when ships are armed with heat-seeking or dumbfire weaponry, with which they are much more efficient (think the first mission of FS2, you can actually lose the transports against the AIs).
Still didn't found major issues, excepted the fact that you have to make sure that you don't have the new AI applied to turrets, especially on the bomber's turrets, in order to not break balance.
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It's good to hear you like the AI. I would much appreciate any feedback on difficulty levels as I'd like to ensure that the AI scales properly, and is not either too easy or too hard for selected difficulty level.
Here's another table I was planning to put into third version of the AI, but due to so little feedback I'm posting it separately for now. It's completely optional and it's not AI change really. It changes turret behavior on fighter and bomber class ships to pick their targets independently, like in capital ships. Retail behavior on those ship classes is that turrets fire on pilot's target, assuming target is in field of view. This makes especially Shivan bombers like Nephilim and Seraphim much more dangerous.
Edit: Attachment deleted, you can get it from the link in first post in this topic.
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That would be helpful if it affected playerships too.
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You're referring to the optional tbm in my earlier post? It does affect ALL ships classified as either fighter or bomber.
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Nice, I was planning on making a fighter that had ****ty primary banks but several turrets so that .tbm file will certainly help.
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I tried a modified version with my Wings mod (modified to fit the general gameplay style and extremely high speeds) and unlike some people who found it made the AI less aggressive, I found it made them much more aggressive. They would fire missile after missile at their targets, making the game much more hectic. I once was pursuing this one fighter and saw other fighters fire 32 missiles at it in the span of 10 seconds.
(http://i538.photobucket.com/albums/ff348/tankermottind/triplem2.png)
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Much more aggressive than SCP current AI?
Cuz uhh.... all SCP current AI does is pick a target and go "IT MUST DIE OR I WILL RAM IT TO DEATHZORS (..and keep shooting anyway)."
>.>
You don't get much more 'aggressive' than current SCP AI (because it's limited/stupid - doesn't do anything other than attack -.-), well, on insane anyway.
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On Medium they certainly try to evade. They're not very good at it but they try.
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Yeah, tried the sample missions provided on Medium- the differences were subtle, but were there. I'd see AI ships randomly adjusting speed when broadside to me, I also saw quite a bit more jinking, particularly when charging in head-to-head. Not much else to report- only have about half an hour with the new profile... on Medium, no less...
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The change of behavior may be subtle, but it is there. For example a wing of Valkyrie doesn't drop like flies anymore, actually they are quite effective at dogfighting.
They also are much more effective when using heat-seeking and dumbfire missiles.
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On Medium they certainly try to evade. They're not very good at it but they try.
Hmh, could you try out how much of a difference you can see in AI at different difficulty settings? Hard and Insane AI should be better in their movements.
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I meant the original AI on Medium. QuantumDelta seemed to think that the retail AI fighters always chase you with psychotic single-mindedness like on Insane regardless of difficulty. They fly much better on Medium with your new AI than originally. Even on Easy there's a noticeable difference, and not just the constant missile lock tones.
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Oh, I see.
Woolie Wool & MatthTheGeek, you both said you've customized the AI further. Care to share the details?
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I meant the original AI on Medium. QuantumDelta seemed to think that the retail AI fighters always chase you with psychotic single-mindedness like on Insane regardless of difficulty. They fly much better on Medium with your new AI than originally. Even on Easy there's a noticeable difference, and not just the constant missile lock tones.
You're confusing "Vanilla" with "Retail".
These AI constructs Fury put together is much closer to "Retail" than Vanilla is, and, if you were to have a scale it would roughly work out like this.
Vanilla <--- Retail ---> Fury's AI.
Despite the best efforts of quite a few of the SCP duders and myself, the Vanilla bugs that strip retail ai of some of it's 'personality' remain, and infact show a marked difference in behaviour the higher up the skill/difficulty (general/insane) ladder you go.
The retail AI could still produce and display the behaviour that the SCP AI do, but they would only rarely do it, SCP AI does it 100% of the time, Fury's AI... I've only seen it happen once.
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As the changes in vanilla SCP behavior are corrected to be more like the retail behavior, that won't affect this will it?
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I meant the original AI on Medium. QuantumDelta seemed to think that the retail AI fighters always chase you with psychotic single-mindedness like on Insane regardless of difficulty. They fly much better on Medium with your new AI than originally. Even on Easy there's a noticeable difference, and not just the constant missile lock tones.
You're confusing "Vanilla" with "Retail".
These AI constructs Fury put together is much closer to "Retail" than Vanilla is, and, if you were to have a scale it would roughly work out like this.
Vanilla <--- Retail ---> Fury's AI.
Despite the best efforts of quite a few of the SCP duders and myself, the Vanilla bugs that strip retail ai of some of it's 'personality' remain, and infact show a marked difference in behaviour the higher up the skill/difficulty (general/insane) ladder you go.
The retail AI could still produce and display the behaviour that the SCP AI do, but they would only rarely do it, SCP AI does it 100% of the time, Fury's AI... I've only seen it happen once.
If you could figure out exactly which table entries are causing the more "retail-like" AI behavior, it could make it a lot easier to track down and debug them.
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Oh, I see.
Woolie Wool & MatthTheGeek, you both said you've customized the AI further. Care to share the details?
The main thing I did was to change the stalemate logic. Wings dogfighting is very different from FS dogfighting, the extreme speeds means that there is more emphasis on slashing attacks and maintaining an extended turning battle is very difficult. Therefore I made the stalemate time shorter (18 on Very Easy decreasing by skill level to 10 on Insane), and the distance longer (1200 meters on Very Easy, 2000 on Insane). Since hostile craft now fire faster, I changed the damage multiplier by skill level (0.1 on Very Easy, 0.25 on Easy, 0.5 on Medium, 0.75 on Hard, 1.0 on Insane). Since there is no linked fire penalty in Wings and mostly ammo weapons, there's no reason not to link them, so now the AI always link their primaries.
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Actually, in order to integrate it better within original missions and to minimize the customization of maps adaptation to new AIs, I just modified the original AI classes (Coward, Lieutenant, ...) based on your modified classes, and just added a Turreted class which is a non-modified version of Captain (in the same position in the tbl as Captain was) for all ships that use turrets. Then I changed the default AI of all ships that use turrets to Turreted (including bombers), so they will keep the retail behavior instead of firing at unusual rates. Then, the only thing to change in missions is making sure that bombers use new AI as pilots and Turreted AI for their turrets, and that capital ships' turrets haven't been switched to anything else than Turreted.
My changes are only for integration purpose, the only change in the values I made was to scale the classes properly (Rookie -> Lieutenant, Veteran -> Captain, Elite -> Colonel, and properly scaled values for Major between Veteran and Elite and General above Elite)
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I have updated link in the first post to point to v3 of the AI. This includes the turrets-obt.tbm I attached to a post earlier, it is still completely optional. V3 fixes a minor bug in Wingmen classes $Get Away Chance. V3 alters $AI Turn Time Scale, by default FS2 has severe penalties to how quickly hostile ships can turn. This disables these penalties on all but very easy and easy difficulty levels, but are reduced from defaults even at those difficulties. What you will see is much sharper and faster turns by hostile fighters and bombers.
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Actually, in order to integrate it better within original missions and to minimize the customization of maps adaptation to new AIs, I just modified the original AI classes (Coward, Lieutenant, ...) based on your modified classes, and just added a Turreted class which is a non-modified version of Captain (in the same position in the tbl as Captain was) for all ships that use turrets. Then I changed the default AI of all ships that use turrets to Turreted (including bombers), so they will keep the retail behavior instead of firing at unusual rates. Then, the only thing to change in missions is making sure that bombers use new AI as pilots and Turreted AI for their turrets, and that capital ships' turrets haven't been switched to anything else than Turreted.
My changes are only for integration purpose, the only change in the values I made was to scale the classes properly (Rookie -> Lieutenant, Veteran -> Captain, Elite -> Colonel, and properly scaled values for Major between Veteran and Elite and General above Elite)
You do realize by inserting a new entry where captain was that everything after captain is changed in behavior. The position in the table matters for calculating things. So if your old captain class is now one slot down they will do things like fire more missiles as well as other things.
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Unless he used $Autoscale by AI Class Index: NO
But if that is used, the AI entries no longer behave like in retail anyway. So indeed, changing order of retail AI classes should not be done.
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Unless he used $Autoscale by AI Class Index: NO
But if that is used, the AI entries no longer behave like in retail anyway. So indeed, changing order of AI retail classes should not be done.
I turned autoscale off for all classes excepted Turreted indeed. Everything seems to work pretty fine with my modified version, and it saves a lot of time when adapting missions to the new AIs.
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Unfortunately that means retail AI classes no longer behave like they are supposed to. The flag turns off hard-coded class index multipliers, which quite likely can throw mission balance out of the window. But so does using my tweaks on retail classes anyhow.
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Well until the bugs are fixed not even that flag matters for all cases.
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I know retail AI classes doesn't behave like they used to be, but that's how I want it to be, playing retail missions with enhanced AI. Don't worry, I didn't drop them in the data folder or whatever, I created a new mod just for the new AI and adapted missions. That's the best way to test the AI in every situation I think, and I went through most of FS2 campaign without major problems (excepted the first ones that are a little harder, when everyone has only heat-seeking and dumbfire). The fact that your wingmen are enhanced too plays a lot in maintaining balance.
And btw, I really love the new behavior with turn rates fixed. Whoever doubted that the Loki is the Dragon of GTVA should play against them in Hard with the new AI :drevil:
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I've played a bit with your ai fury, and i have to say that it's very, very nice.
I've tweak it a bit to fit Ep, i'm rather happy with the close dogfight behavior, but i've not understood why, ai seems unable to shoot any missile now.
I've change the line to this :
$Chance AI Has to Fire Missiles at Player: 5, 5, 6, 6, 6
To ensure it will shoot at me but it doesn't.
Maybe i should take a look on the missile them self, i will try to increase their effectivness distance and decrease lock time to see , if they just can't manage to acquire a lock.
I ve made a 1 sec long lock missile for a 10 000 effective range, it still doesn't fire anything.
So i'll have to look elsewhere
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Are you playing on very easy? AI will almost never fire a missile on very easy.
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No, on medium, and i"ve try to figure out why, and untill now i could not.
I've just try on insane and it shot at me.
hmmm i'll take a look after a good night of sleep.
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If you could figure out exactly which table entries are causing the more "retail-like" AI behavior, it could make it a lot easier to track down and debug them.
Fury be the dude turning the dials, the immediate built(I think?) from our internal testing session was probably pretty close to what retail was.
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Tryed with fury original's table, it behave the same, they only shot missile on insane, tryed with retail ai et ai_profile, behave the same too,
I guess problem are somewhere else.
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Just did a playthrough of this AI on Very Easy.
Right, here are things I've noted.
- The AI DOES fire secondaries (at least, for seekers they do), and they do it with the gayest of abandon:
(http://jwmwcw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pujUrlR88JnP7qEZmQCKDG-wjBOCzPPflaPqCjpNdYKfZ3zjJRlYcstC5wDHCm1vnptaW5ctaVFHAAzZGMW6LuSefrSaBQr-n/fs23610_009_fury.png)
(http://jwmwcw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pujUrlR88JnMv5KgglkxEU_VFhettv93mEuL7PzZsh1F8975KvCvVcaW7CVPIba-7tzez3HHNh0urKsnIrgjY0ZWixX7VlTS8/fs23610_010_fury.png)
- The AI shunts power between shield quadrants, but they only seem to concentrate on one quadrant ONLY, even if you hit them from another angle.
- The AI does not use the afterburner to catch up to targets they are assigned to protect:
(http://jwmwcw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1paUHXtQ4aBJ950UNTDaCw3oYZJ9zVbpF-3o7pdVSHb0fUpvfXOJw5N40xhWWfZi3_xv1QVsVAARXgISrwl-rFLPt4o1FMupli/fs23610_008_fury.png)
- AI-controlled ships tend to make friends with each other when chasing down a single target, usually a fighter:
(http://jwmwcw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pL94Hs4JmrdVf0_J6lHwXYlcXPb6lUhj29I4m_-42O1T8cOjSp9S2QKotMvyjzJR82AKUaEju5Vc70RV75cM7mvJaSg6wc_Pd/fs23610_012_fury.png)
(http://jwmwcw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pJwK7yNKvgGsgMj-BG9N7wPXBDl9Let4CyZjj_Kq6mRGOQ0QEpo2xWeUkBh2zOng_0afXqbIiLIaHdutHnawiByYD1w_BmC8F/fs23610_013_fury.png)
(http://jwmwcw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pRpPpWhAwqPE9Toi9apYLYeFpC7Xmr-oA_FWVmES3rbd59yHd5oAtsh_4003v8tk4sbPrHp-BE_-uVGyKFzNIgbsxaGDWARkN/fs23610_014_fury.png)
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Afterburner use factor on lower difficulties should be trivial fix. Unfortunately I can't do anything about to which quadrant AI decides to direct power to, my guess is that this would be something Sushi could improve on for flag $smart shield management. I think the issue you're showing in your three last screenshots is fairly common in FS2, that is because AI does not do any distance or collision checks with other ships other than its current target. :(
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Yeah, and even IF stated otherwise, as far as I can tell by looking at the code. :/ Turret/subsystem AI classes don't appear to do anything based on what I see in the code, although I thought I remember someone saying they COULD see a difference. I dunno.
I just tested $accuracy, $Friendly AI Fire Delay Scale, $Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale and $Max Aim Update Delay on turrets. Changing values of those flags did make a difference. So obviously AI classes work on turrets even though it is not readily apparent from looking at the code.
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I can tell you AI classes do have an effect on turrets. When using the custom AI on turret, I noticed their rate of fire is increased considerably, actually they fire at the maximum rate of fire allowed.
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Just tryed with "no mod" i have the same problem, i guess this is time for a fresh fs2 install ;)
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actually they fire at the maximum rate of fire allowed.
That is governed by $Friendly AI Fire Delay Scale and $Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale, which in my tables happens to be 1.0 on all but very easy and easy difficulties. So yes, turrets on medium difficulty and above would be able to fire at rates specified in weapons table.
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I know, that's why I created a Turreted class which keeps the settings of the retail Captain class, in order to preserve balance :)
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That third issue reported by Androgeos makes me hope I will run into it when haveing Infyrnos loaded. :)
In fact, I did. When playing ToT demo Seraphims approached from a huge distance and when they reached station they were flying like that. Direct hit and one hit kill. :)
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I know, that's why I created a Turreted class which keeps the settings of the retail Captain class, in order to preserve balance :)
When you open a ship to ship editor in fred, AI classes in turrets do nothing at all. Flags that affect turrets do so through pilot AI. This means that you cannot have different AI classes for pilot and turrets on same ship, turrets will use pilot AI regardless of what you set in fred. So whether you actually specify ship AI class in ships.tbl or change pilot AI in fred, the end result is same.
Hopefully this would be corrected to 3.6.14, probably too late for 3.6.12.
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Hopefully this would be corrected to 3.6.14, probably too late for 3.6.12.
What with 3.6.13?
Is it that complicated, or maybe you'd just like to skip the unlucky number in the numeration? :)
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Even numbers = release builds. So there will be no 3.6.11 or 3.6.13 etc.
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So 3.6.11 and 3.6.13 will have only Nightlies?
I thought there was a 3.6.9 final, but it most likely was just latest, most stable 3.6.9 nightly.
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Errm, no. 3.6.9 was as official a release as it gets.
However, the numbering scheme was changed recently, so from now on, dev releases will have an uneven number, stable releases an even one.
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Link in the first post updated once again. Sorry for quick update, but I think afterburner issue needed to be addressed ASAP.
Turns out that $Afterburner Use Factor is not really flexible. It only accepts integers where values are 1 = 100%, 2 = 50%, 3 = 33.33% and so on. So there's a huge drop between values 1 and 2. I fixed this by editing values across the board to 1, which makes the AI to use afterburners as often as they can, within their own logic. Hopefully Sushi can address this problem and give us the missing range between 100% and 50%.
Another more minor change is that there is higher chance of AI firing a missile at player especially at lower difficulties.
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When you open a ship to ship editor in fred, AI classes in turrets do nothing at all. Flags that affect turrets do so through pilot AI. This means that you cannot have different AI classes for pilot and turrets on same ship, turrets will use pilot AI regardless of what you set in fred. So whether you actually specify ship AI class in ships.tbl or change pilot AI in fred, the end result is same.
Hopefully this would be corrected to 3.6.14, probably too late for 3.6.12.
Are you sure of that ? It may be a placebo effect, but I'm pretty sure that my bombers have their turrets firing at retail rate, much slower than if they used the same improved AI than the pilots. But I might be mistaken though.
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Yep, tested it today and results were same by Wanderer.
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Alright thanks, that will make implementation of new AI even quicker with my modified versions, cause I now just have to modify the default class of all turreted ships (excepted bombers) to Turreted and that's all.
And with further testing, I must say that the most noticeable part of customized AI is really the standardized turn rates. Believe me when I say that you don't want to fight a wing of Dragon with a General AI in Hard :p
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I would like to ask people to test this attached ai.tbl (this is based on v4). Compare this ai.tbl to the one in ai_v4.zip and tell me which one has better dogfights and why. Thanks in advance.
Edit: Obsolete attachment removed
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Umm, anyone? (excluding QuantumDelta)
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It seems the AI is less agressive than in the version 4. I liked the version 4 better because it seemed your wingman were more proactive in what they did.
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Thanks, that's what QuantumDelta said too. So I guess that's how it is. :)
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If someone still has any interest into AI testing, here's some work for you. Open ai.tbl in ai_v4.zip
Find
$Stalemate Distance Threshold: 300, 300, 300, 300, 300
Replace all six lines with
$Stalemate Distance Threshold: 150, 150, 150, 150, 150
Once you've played and tested above values, please try these
$Stalemate Distance Threshold: 100, 100, 100, 100, 100
I'd appreciate if you would tell me what values you found best for typical FS2 dogfights. Thank you very much. :)
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Link to v5 in the first post in this topic. This will quite likely be the last release unless I receive notable feedback or Sushi fixes/adds more AI stuff.
This release contains minor tweaks mostly, making very easy and easy difficulties easier and moving YES/NO flags to ai_profiles.tbl.
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This is the AI used on the WiH trailer right? I'm trying out Into The Lion's Den on Medium and there is some slightly higher aggression here and there but I still see a lot of "clueless" Shivans.
And Apocalypse was utter bomb-rape, I lol'd. :lol:
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You need a recent nightly for it to work. You'll also need to set the AI profile in the mission in FRED. You'll also want to check the AI classes assigned to the ships.
I just tried it out on WiH m07 and holy crap it makes a difference.
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Unless the Antipode#4 build doesn't count, and aren't the three missions in this .zip already altered to use the AI?
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Dunno, haven't tried 'em!
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This is the AI used on the WiH trailer right? I'm trying out Into The Lion's Den on Medium and there is some slightly higher aggression here and there but I still see a lot of "clueless" Shivans.
In the Lion's Den there were a bunch of Shivan fighters who used "Coward" AI originally, I only changed it to "Rookie" custom AI and didn't touch their orders. It is quite likely that behavior is by mission design. A lot depends on mission design since AI operates on set orders.
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BP staffers had complained time and time again about how ineffective missiles were against custom AI pilots. I brought up the issue on #scp which revealed countermeasures had been broken past four years.
<Wanderer>: countermeasures have been broken for past 4 years
<Wanderer>: pheaks countermeasure commit r2531 made all countermeasures better than they should be
<Wanderer>: actually.. if a missile is within countermeasures range it will be decoyed instead of there being a chance for a missile to be decoyed
Which basically means that countermeasures were 100% effective.
Wanderer fixed this four years old bug and the first .11 build to have this fix would be Zacam's test build available here: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=67028.0
If you have Radeon card, the shaders linked in the topic may not work but can safely be ignored.
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I wonder if that's another one to be struck off this list then;
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=65213.msg1297427#msg1297427
;D
Awesome work.
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I wonder if that's another one to be struck off this list then;
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=65213.msg1297427#msg1297427
;D
Awesome work.
Could you either update the first post on that thread or then post a new one so that the remaining issues would be easier to sort out?
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BP staffers had complained time and time again about how ineffective missiles were against custom AI pilots. I brought up the issue on #scp which revealed countermeasures had been broken past four years.
<Wanderer>: countermeasures have been broken for past 4 years
<Wanderer>: pheaks countermeasure commit r2531 made all countermeasures better than they should be
<Wanderer>: actually.. if a missile is within countermeasures range it will be decoyed instead of there being a chance for a missile to be decoyed
Which basically means that countermeasures were 100% effective.
Wanderer fixed this four years old bug and the first .11 build to have this fix would be Zacam's test build available here: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=67028.0
If you have Radeon card, the shaders linked in the topic may not work but can safely be ignored.
No wonder I stopped using Harpoons. So they'll be USEFUL against Interceptors again now?
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question, did anyone happen to experience massive slowdowns after starting to use the modified AI?
not GPU related, of course.
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:wtf:
If AI would cause slowdowns, BP staffers would have complained about it long time ago. Besides, I see no way for custom AI to cause any slowdown whatsoever.
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okay then. i have to test out thing more thoroughly then. no reports of slowdowns at all in any scenario?
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There is very easy way for you to confirm whether it is caused by custom AI. Change mission to use retail AI profile, in ai.tbl delete everything after $patience in each class.
Edit: I Just realized there is indeed one factor that may cause slowdowns; AI Fire Delay Scale. If you have weak CPU which cannot handle significant increase in weapons effects on-screen, you might have issues. This would only be an issue if you use custom AI on capital ships or any weapon with really high rate of fire. However, The E who is also a BP staffer, has fairly weak (by modern standards) 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo does not receive heavy slowdowns in WiH which is largely unoptimized in terms of model and texture efficiency, so performance in plain mediavps is even better.
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There is very easy way for you to confirm whether it is caused by custom AI. Change mission to use retail AI profile, in ai.tbl delete everything after $patience in each class.
Edit: I Just realized there is indeed one factor that may cause slowdowns; AI Fire Delay Scale. If you have weak CPU which cannot handle significant increase in weapons effects on-screen, you might have issues. This would only be an issue if you use custom AI on capital ships or any weapon with really high rate of fire. However, The E who is also a BP staffer, has fairly weak (by modern standards) 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo does not receive heavy slowdowns in WiH which is largely unoptimized in terms of model and texture efficiency, so performance in plain mediavps is even better.
i will test it soon, TAP internal stuff was rather unoptimised, so i tought it might have been that but isnt at all. i'll test out the ai fire delay scale, but whats bothering me is the fact that it only crawls to a halt when you're especially near it all (200-300 meters).
Intel C2D E7500 2.93GHz, 2x2GB DDR2 800 ram, XFX 260GTX (nvidia 260 gtx, 216sp version, aka teh beef)...
it could be the fire delay scale tho, as our weapons already had a bit of an insane refire rates...
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A secondary effect to watch out for is collision detection. More projectiles mean more collision checks, and those are the most computationally expensive things in the engine right now.
But yeah, it's important to know if this is a change due to switching tables or switching builds.
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I think this may have already been pointed out, but I just want to make sure...
Enemies seem to like to get very close and then stay very close... so circle fights with other enemies able to jump in are not fun at all.
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I think this may have already been pointed out, but I just want to make sure...
Enemies seem to like to get very close and then stay very close... so circle fights with other enemies able to jump in are not fun at all.
Tip;
Treat this AI like you're fighting another player, if you do end up in a deadlock-ish fight, whilst you're chasing your current target be scanning in the extreme for incoming threats, break and attack said threats to pull both into a deadlock repeat until your enemies die from collision damage with eachother, or your squad mates kill them.
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Semi-newtonian flight model with gliding now available to retail FS2 ships. This should be used together with custom AI for AI to make proper use of it. Based on SushiGlide mod by Sushi. To use gliding, please see control config in-game.
http://www.mediafire.com/?w25j5zytndj
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I think this may have already been pointed out, but I just want to make sure...
Enemies seem to like to get very close and then stay very close... so circle fights with other enemies able to jump in are not fun at all.
Tip;
Treat this AI like you're fighting another player, if you do end up in a deadlock-ish fight, whilst you're chasing your current target be scanning in the extreme for incoming threats, break and attack said threats to pull both into a deadlock repeat until your enemies die from collision damage with eachother, or your squad mates kill them.
Heheh... Collision damage with each other? Are human players that bad?
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Yeah, collisions avoidance are one of the things that sucks the most on the FS engine, but I don't think we can do a lot about it anyway.
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I think this may have already been pointed out, but I just want to make sure...
Enemies seem to like to get very close and then stay very close... so circle fights with other enemies able to jump in are not fun at all.
Tip;
Treat this AI like you're fighting another player, if you do end up in a deadlock-ish fight, whilst you're chasing your current target be scanning in the extreme for incoming threats, break and attack said threats to pull both into a deadlock repeat until your enemies die from collision damage with eachother, or your squad mates kill them.
Heheh... Collision damage with each other? Are human players that bad?
Well it was actually a case of them being that good, by the time the final squadwar season closed people's average dogfight distance wasn't that much bigger than my own (so, about 90-150m), the more skilled a pilot is the more predictable they are because they'll only ever make the "most correct" decision, which means if you can stay a step ahead bringing them in to hit eachother when you're being chased by two or more of them isn't actually that hard (since they all wanna occupy the same space at the same time to chase you).
Sounds dumb, but in the heat of battle it can happen quite a bit when you're turning at those distances.
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I have yet to receive sufficient amount of feedback from people who usually play FS2 on very easy and easy difficulties. I really need to be sure that these AI settings are lenient enough at these two difficulties. Thanks in advance.
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I guess everyone's just too good for those difficulties. ;)
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Andro plays on Very Easy, IIRC. Throw the new AI at him and see what he thinks.
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I already have it. I've just been too busy playing ASW and DoS. :nervous:
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I don't have the time and I still have stuff to clear; that said, I play on Medium but even then I tend to get my arse kicked if I don't play properly (or if the missions aren't balanced overall). I could give it a try but honestly I don't know if can finish within my deadlines. :doubt:
Though IMO, since campaigns have stories in them... instead of treating difficulty "as difficulty" for those two levels, how about treating them in such a way that the player can experience and finish the campaign plot first? E.g. story comes first so we'll give you lots of help here, blow things up second; the higher the difficulty, the more it leans to the latter e.g. you only want a reason to blow stuff up, so we'll make everybody gang-r*** you.
Then if the player thinks it's too cheap or they want a challenge, they can increase the difficulty?
Just my thoughts on it anyway...
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I play on Easy, but I don't know if I'd be the right person to know what I was looking at. I sometimes have enough trouble with the retail AI as-is. :p
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I guess everyone's just too good for those difficulties. ;)
I think it has more to do with people being afraid of admitting to playing on Easy or Very Easy and being labeled a noob.
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Hey, I'll admit it proudly whenever someone asks. I play campaigns to be entertained by the authors' storytelling and mission-design skills, not to be repetitively frustrated because I keep getting my ass handed to me. :p
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I think it has more to do with people being afraid of admitting to playing on Easy or Very Easy and being labeled a noob.
Hey, I'm proud of cheating on Very Easy. :p
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I play on Easy, but I don't know if I'd be the right person to know what I was looking at. I sometimes have enough trouble with the retail AI as-is. :p
You are. This AI is used in WiH and unless someone like you and Androgeos tests it for us, there is a chance that WiH will be far too difficult for people like you.
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Hmm...when you put it that way, I guess I don't have much of a choice. I can't promise the world, but I can at least give it a shot on Easy and see what happens.
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Right, I've tested it on Very Easy. On the whole, it's quite an improvement over retail AI.
In Apocalypse with the new AI, I encountered little difficulty escorting the transports. The only ship I did lose was one of the Lambdas. My wingmen had a few issues coping, though. Here's a summarised casualty list:
I started this mission off in a Herc II with three wingmen also flying Herc IIs. Beta Wing comprised of 4 Ulysses fighters. Gamma wing comprised of 2 damaged Perseus fighters, and Theta wing comprised of 4 Serapis fighters.
At the end of the mission, the following were dead: Alphas 3 and 4, Beta 1, Gamma 2 and the whole of Theta wing. If anything, it's proof that flying a Ulysses in the last mission is probably the best way to go. :p
...But Hate the Traitor was real fun. With retail AI, it's a cake walk simply because they're forever flying upwards when you're behind them, but with this new AI, it's both challenging and fun. It took me a lot longer than usual to kill Alphas and Beta. More notably, they know when I'm on their six, and when they do, they start making quick, sudden changes in their trajectory to prevent me from successfully leading them. I had one of them in front of me for a very long time, and I just couldn't hit it.
It was still pretty easy, though. I lost only 15% hull on that mission: 1% to a collision, and 14% to the Saharan's AAAh (I can never evade that).
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Played both ...But Hate the Traitor and Into the Lions den on insane. I beat ...But Hate the Traitor with no significant problems, with 34% of hull remaining at the end. On Into the Depths of Hell, however, the first round I lost with five minutes remaining on the clock, though on the second playthrough I beat it with 62% hull remaining (would have been 77% but the friendlies rammed me a couple of times. :doubt:). I will play Apocalypse now on insane, but I won't just sit at the node until the supernova triggers. :P
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Thanks to Androgeos' and Hades' feedback on IRC, I have tweaked several values in ai.tbl and v6 is now linked to in the first post in this topic. It now works as a mod you can select in a launcher, readme.txt has been updated as well, so please read it.
What's changed since v5:
- AI has higher chance to use countermeasures
- Shield manage delay lowered for Rookie and Veteran
- Stalemate time threshold slightly lowered
- Max aim update delay cut in half
AI is a bit tougher now as Androgeous did so well on very easy. Continued feedback is most welcome to find the optimum balance in all difficulty levels. It is highly recommended to use 3.6.11 build 5720 or newer to get fixed countermeasures.
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Just for a bit of information, I've attached two images to this post. Both of them are kill lists for ...But Hate the Traitor. The first one is the kill list after Fury reduced fire delay in v5, while the second one is the kill list after Fury modified the AI's chance of releasing countermeasures and reduced the AI's shield management delay in v5.
[attachment deleted by admin]
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A quick clarification, will this do anything if I put the new AI folder into a secondarylist for another mod?
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No unless you edit missions of said mod to use this AI profile and classes.
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Settles that then.
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V7 now linked in the first post in this topic. This update has no AI tweaks since v6, but instead previous three sample missions have been deleted and replaced by full FS2 campaign mission files excluding training missions. In other words, when you select CustomAI as your mod in launcher, you can play FS2 campaign with custom AI. These missions are based on latest mediavps patch, so you need to have your mediavps up-to-date. Only fighters and bombers AI were changed.
I stress that missions have not been balanced for this AI, some may be really easy and some really hard and some perhaps even impossible. You can access all campaign mission by pressing Ctrl - Shift - S in tech room.
If you find any problems with these missions, feel free to report. I probably won't fix mission balance issues however, but if you find fighters or bombers still using retail AI classes, large ship using custom AI or a mission that still uses Retail FS2 AI profile, let me know.
This update was brought to you by a boring day at work.
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No unless you edit missions of said mod to use this AI profile and classes.
OR, you're already using a custom AI profile or classes, some re-naming in the tbl files and it will basicly replace "your" AI with Fury's
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Actually, I don't believe that's the case. Fury has different names for his AI Classes. Fury's AI and Retail AI are designed to co-exist, as far as mission editing is concerned.
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Unless you are renaming Fury's AI class names to retail AI class names. :p
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I tried that myself but I don't think it held any positive results.
Edit: As in not affecting the AI at all.
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I did it and it is surprisingly playable. You can go through most retail missions (FSPort and FS2) without major mission breaking (I did said most :p), but custom campaigns are much less well-balanced.
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I wonder if anyone actually noticed that the latest version of the mod includes FS2 campaign missions. :rolleyes:
Anyway, if someone wants to play those missions with AI doing its very best at every difficulty level (no difficulty scaling), be my guest and use attached ai.tbl to replace the one in the latest mod. I think this is pretty much the limit of what FS2 AI can do without resorting to cheating. AI in this attached ai.tbl is marginally better than Elite on Insane difficulty.
[attachment deleted by admin]
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I've noticed it but I'm not touching it unless Ctrl + Shift + S somehow magically ****ing starts to work again on this computer. :doubt:
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While testing my auto-shield focus script, I came across a bug in this. With Fury's AI, if you shunt energy from shields to lasers (NOT ETS, but actually transferring energy [default key is shift+scroll-lock]) the shields will not drain. This essentially means you can zero your laser energy and just transfer energy from shields to lasers for unlimited power.
The reverse (lasers to shields) does not have this issue.
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I've confirmed this issue, even with all power in engines (none in weapons or shields.) The transfer is very slow, so it's not a huge issue, but it's worth fixing.
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While testing my auto-shield focus script, I came across a bug in this. With Fury's AI, if you shunt energy from shields to lasers (NOT ETS, but actually transferring energy [default key is shift+scroll-lock]) the shields will not drain. This essentially means you can zero your laser energy and just transfer energy from shields to lasers for unlimited power.
The reverse (lasers to shields) does not have this issue.
This happens only when using Fury's AI? And affects the player's energy transfer?
That is weird.
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Actually, no, we've not confirmed that. ChronoReverse confirmed the issue did not appear on retail, and did not appear when he selected 'MediaVPs' or 'no mod'. I'm assuming the mod he had selected when he did have the problem was the Fury AI alone.
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You should report that bug on SCP Mantis if it has not been already. It has nothing to do with custom AI.
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Would I put that it only occurs when the custom AI is loaded though? :confused: I'll do that if that is the correct thing to put.
This will not occur with the other mods I've tested so far (only CustomAI does it and Battuta says that WiH with custom AI does it too). And it's actually a pretty significant problem since when you transfer energy from shields to lasers, the laser energy will charge at maximum rate (as if ETS for lasers are pushed to maximum) for a few seconds.
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:wtf:
The only related function in ai_profiles is $Player Shield Recharge Scale and $Player Weapon Recharge Scale. If those were bugged, you'd notice it all the time and not only when transferring energy. I just don't see how it would be possible for edited ai_profiles.tbl or ai.tbl to cause what you described.
Post a bug report to SCP Mantis and request Sushi to take a look at it.
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Reported, I hope I did it properly.
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Yep, you did. I'll ask more questions trying to narrow this down on Mantis.
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Wait, transferring shield energy to lasers with the laser allocation at zero and having it somehow recharge on its own?
Seen it happen long before this Table.
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No that's normal.
When you transfer a chunk of energy from shields to lasers, it doesn't dump the energy into lasers at once but just increases the laser recharge rate to max for a few seconds. The energy is immediately taken out of the shields though.
However, this bug meant the chunk that was supposed to go out of shields isn't coming out. Therefore, you could have what amounts to maximum laser energy recharge rate despite setting it to zero without paying the cost in shield energy.
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This mod has been discontinued and replaced by Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius 3.6.12 Feature Pack (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=68214.msg1347074#msg1347074).
You can delete any old CustomAI mods you may have downloaded.