[T-Man]

I'm not 100% sure if this is a bug so i thought this the best place to post it. Hoping one of the coders can assist.

Ever since upgrading to the newer FSOpen, i've noticed odd behaviour amongst AI wingman in missions; they just seem... dumber... than before; movement is sluggish, they tend to fire behined an enemy instead of following their shots, and they have this strange tendency to ocassionally slow to a crawl if not stop completly, ignoring any enemies around them. It seems to start happening a little into a mission, but i couldn't give a definate time.

The sluggishness have serious implications in missions; if they're told to guard a ship, they simply float and occassionally take poorly aimed shots at ships, making missions much harder (as most of the enemy AI still behaves normally). The only way to get meaningfull fighting out of them is to order "Engage the enemy" or "destroy target" (which means having to target all bombs yourself), but then if i give an "Ignore my target" order they seem to go a bit sluggish again. This has happened in three campaigns so far (Derelict, STL: Origins and STL) and also happened in a newly-made FRED mission i was working on, so i'm confident its not tied to a particular campaign. I had seen something vaguely similar in the past, but only with enemy ships that had been ingame for a long time (like ten minutes); they would stop briefly as if thinking through things, then start fighting again. The PC i'm running on has 4GB of ram so i don't think its the computer struggling (can't be sure on that though).

I know nothing at all about AI, so i can't say if its an actual bug or not. Did the team make any tweaks to the AI recently? Any idea what it might be? I'm running the game on Easy level btw.

(If this turns out to be nothing, then i apologise in advance for wasting people's time).

[Commander Zane]

AI is determined by mission settings of ships and difficulty of the game.

[Sushi]

Ever since upgrading to the newer FSOpen, i've noticed odd behaviour amongst AI wingman in missions; they just seem... dumber... than before; movement is sluggish, they tend to fire behined an enemy instead of following their shots, and they have this strange tendency to ocassionally slow to a crawl if not stop completly, ignoring any enemies around them. It seems to start happening a little into a mission, but i couldn't give a definate time.

Which versions of FSOPen are we talking about? Which was "Before upgrading" and which is "after upgrading? Do you get any messages if you use a debug build? Could you post a super-simple test mission and/or video that shows what you're talking about?

I've been doing a lot of AI code, but it's all in the 3.6.11 (Nightly) branch. Also, all of the changes are opt-in (at least, that's how they're supposed to be ) so nothing should be changing a mod asks it to.

[T-Man]

I'm running 3.6.10 (sorry i should've mentioned that), running the 3.6.10 media VPs. Origionally i was on 3.6.9.

I shall try to make an example if i can, but it's happening so much i had imagined it would be noticeable to others when they looked into it. If not than maybe its a one-off thing.

EDIT: I tried making a simple example mission (have no way to record screen videos, sorry), and replayed two missions where i really noticed it ("Salvage" and "Seige" in Srouding The Light) . This time they seemed to be behaving okay. I shall keep an eye on it over the next few days; hope this isn't a flase alarm . It seemed to happen during escorts the most; wingmen would moving around as in escort and not break off to stop ships that were attacking, or they would slow down to a crawl (if not stop) and ignore fights going on around them.

I might experiment with the mission i made later too; that is where i had the worse happenings (i remember one instance where one a wingman AI seemed to get stuck in a straight line and was over 200000 away when i noticed. That may have been something i did though so i didn't think it a good example (i remember going into the order's menu for that wing later and finding the order entry was blank; i didn't even say "no orders", so thought that might have been it). If i manage to recreate the problem i'll send the mission over to you or put it up here.