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I don't think so. The critters seem to do that for other odd reasons. If it was only the range thing, then critters with no melee attacks would hold to the range of their shortest range attack, but Phantasms which have no melee attacks and a ranged preference run right up to melee range and then use power blast, which is still odd.|
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
So, wait...does THAT explain why my Drones and Protector bots absolutely have to, without fail, go and punch the AV in the face? Because I know they never used to do that.
Although I did notice the problem seemed to kick in around the time demons went live, and then never changed, so....? |
My guess is that there's still another set of oddities within the part of critters' AI brain that controls why they run towards or away from targets that is also a bit squirrely.
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If the critter has am 80 foot ranged attack and 60 foot ranged attack, and the 80 is recharging and the 60 is available, if the critter is standing 70 feet away it should move closer and use the 60. In the old days it would sometimes wait at 70 if it thought the 80 was coming back soon rather than move closer and use the 60.|
Originally Posted by William_Valence
Sort of what I meant, but I didn't say it well. If they don't consider range, the Attack, move, wait decision is skewed from it's original Implementation. Now, critters that have melee attacks will use them; pushing them into melee, while critters that don't have melee attacks suffer from a seemingly conditionless move choice (when either attacks are unavailable, and there seems to be no wait condition) once they find themselves unable to attack.
Meaning, in a somewhat roundabout way that the fix meant no more range. Am I missing something that makes that not accurate? |
I believe this was an attempt by the original designer to make the critters "smarter." To prevent sucking up CPU on the servers, the critters don't make constant decisions every 30th of a second. The only make decisions periodically unless forced to by a change in conditions (getting hit, for example). So if you have an 80' attack recharging and a 60' ready, it might be better to wait for the 80' and use it rather than pursue the target into range of the 60'. In fact, if the target is running away you could be pursuing longer than it would have taken to just wait and shoot. But this more complex behavior was itself prone to getting jammed or confused, and it had to be hard-coded so it relied on powers recharging at a particular range of rates. Outside of that sweet spot, faster recharge could confuse the AI.
The critters still think about range in terms of deciding whether to get into an optimal range for certain attacks, but they no longer try to *predict* what the best move will be in advance. You could say they are aware of range but have no memory of range.
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In laymans terms, the AI is totally and utterly bat-****.
It's just that sometimes it happens to **** in the right direction? 
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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And this would be part of the attack decision, yes? |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The critters still think about range in terms of deciding whether to get into an optimal range for certain attacks, but they no longer try to *predict* what the best move will be in advance. You could say they are aware of range but have no memory of range.
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Theory; critter is put into a Decision state, and needs to attack, move, or wait? There's no viable wait decision anymore as waiting seemed to be a permutation of the attack decision (wait to attack with an unavailable power instead of deciding to attack with a new power) and they don't try to predict action anymore so they would't know to wait.
Then, getting to the attack decision. They would once again use melee attacks in turn, without any method to consider if it was a desirable option to. This would have them consider range in forcing them to move into melee range to use the power.
If they have no attack powers available, my theory is they are forced into a move action, with no real ability to choose to wait, deciding to move closer to the target for some reason. Really until this thread I would have sworn the AI had them check to see if there is an action available, if not move closer, if yes execute. At whatever frequency or triggers it is they did checks.
I've yet to discover what causes a decision state, but durring runs on the dummy to see what the pets do with regard to ranged vs Melee, attacks seemed to have a very high "Priority", if that's a good way to put it.
Murphys Military Law
#23. Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at.
#46. If you can't remember, the Claymore is pointed towards you.
#54. Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.
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Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. There are critters that "stand off" from the player and clearly even if they have no attacks they will not rush the player. But some player pets do the opposite: even if they have ranged attacks available they will rush the target, even though they have no melee attacks for which that might be a theoretical advantage.|
Originally Posted by William_Valence
And this would be part of the attack decision, yes?
Theory; critter is put into a Decision state, and needs to attack, move, or wait? There's no viable wait decision anymore as waiting seemed to be a permutation of the attack decision (wait to attack with an unavailable power instead of deciding to attack with a new power) and they don't try to predict action anymore so they would't know to wait. Then, getting to the attack decision. They would once again use melee attacks in turn, without any method to consider if it was a desirable option to. This would have them consider range in forcing them to move into melee range to use the power. If they have no attack powers available, my theory is they are forced into a move action, with no real ability to choose to wait, deciding to move closer to the target for some reason. Really until this thread I would have sworn the AI had them check to see if there is an action available, if not move closer, if yes execute. At whatever frequency or triggers it is they did checks. I've yet to discover what causes a decision state, but durring runs on the dummy to see what the pets do with regard to ranged vs Melee, attacks seemed to have a very high "Priority", if that's a good way to put it. |
I only know the parts of the critter AI I tested to death and discussed with the devs. There are other parts of the critter AI that I'm still not sure how they work. If I was allowed to work on one part of the game and clean it up and improve it, it would probably be critter AI. I suspect there are lots of ways to simultaneously make it burn less cycles and yet still be "smarter." Or rather, appear to be smarter even if the actual decision tree they employ is on the surface dumber. Before, the critters were too "smart" for their own good, thinking too much about what to do that they often didn't do anything.
Complicating matters is that its one thing to make a decision tree for attacks, but there are other powers besides attacks critters can use, and also movement preferences (stay at range, close to melee), and also other status effects they are otherwise supposed to obey (taunt, afraid, placate, etc). And these interact in sometimes odd ways. For example, there exists a pseudo mez state that doesn't exist as an actual state flag, but it exists as a behavior. I call it "oblivious" and it sometimes occurs when you first terrorize, then stun a critter. Sometimes, the combination causes a critter to almost act placated: they just walk away as if not aggroed and not terrorized, and also not stunned. I don't know how that happens, because mez states are boolean variables: yes or no. They can't "add" in the normal sense. But it happens.
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That's actually a good description of what *good* critter AI looks like. You only have so many CPU cycles to fake an AI for a critter, so the best AI systems use a few really stupid-simple rules for the critters that are specifically engineered to combine in interesting ways. The best AI makes the critter do the obvious thing 95% of the time, and 5% of the time do something strange but generally productive. It looks, to the average person, like the AI is normally doing the tactically straight forward, but occasionally trying to be creative.
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Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
In laymans terms, the AI is totally and utterly bat-****.
It's just that sometimes it happens to **** in the right direction? |
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This is interesting, which enemies "Stand off"? I'd like very much to play with them, and see how they act. Is this in AE?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. There are critters that "stand off" from the player and clearly even if they have no attacks they will not rush the player. But some player pets do the opposite: even if they have ranged attacks available they will rush the target, even though they have no melee attacks for which that might be a theoretical advantage.
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Murphys Military Law
#23. Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at.
#46. If you can't remember, the Claymore is pointed towards you.
#54. Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.
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How remarkably convenient!|
Originally Posted by Durakken
And I can guess as what reason she has for lying and why others are supporting her, but then I'm not allowed to say why because of certain reasons I can't mention.
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Surely you grasp that saying something like that makes you seem quite the fool to anyone not in this theoretical group of 'in the know' people.
You might as well be saying, "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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Off the top of my head, Council Marksmen and Rikti Drones are perfectly happy shooting you from across the room, and do not prefer to be in melee range like the rest of their buddies do. There are lots of others, but those are the first that come to mind. I think Rularuu Wisps actually run away if you get in melee range, but I haven't fought them much in a long time, so I might be misremembering that.
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Originally Posted by William_Valence
This is interesting, which enemies "Stand off"? I'd like very much to play with them, and see how they act. Is this in AE?
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Yup, now that you say it I'm feeling a little silly for not thinking of it.|
Originally Posted by Hopeling
Off the top of my head, Council Marksmen and Rikti Drones are perfectly happy shooting you from across the room, and do not prefer to be in melee range like the rest of their buddies do. There are lots of others, but those are the first that come to mind. I think Rularuu Wisps actually run away if you get in melee range, but I haven't fought them much in a long time, so I might be misremembering that.
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Thanks
Murphys Military Law
#23. Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at.
#46. If you can't remember, the Claymore is pointed towards you.
#54. Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.
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He might be trying to refer to the post I made in the CoH2 thread that said this.|
Originally Posted by Ironblade
How remarkably convenient!
Surely you grasp that saying something like that makes you seem quite the fool to anyone not in this theoretical group of 'in the know' people. You might as well be saying, "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." |
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Someone should ask her to drop by the Grapple/Swing thread and deal with the "I was a programmer that worked on another engine and this should be easy to add to this game regardless of what the devs say."
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Originally Posted by Border_line
as a programmer myself who has worked with the Q3 engine, anything is possible with the engine, they just have to put the effort in to code it to do it.
Making the required modifications shouldn't be that difficult for the devs. Grapple hooks are relatively easy to implement given that it's been in the original Unreal and Q3 engines that predate CoX. |
Now if that is what he is referring to, then the only way I can figure that he can come to the bizarre conclusion that there is a conspiracy against him is if Border_line is an alternate identity on a secondary account that he owns and he is assuming that there is a group of players that know both of his forum identities and that he uses them to support his own posts.
Personally I think Border_line is a completely different person and not the OP's "alter ego".
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As far as I'm aware, the Bots pets have ALWAYS done this. It's ebbed and flowed how much they did it, and it really spiked around the time demons went live, then only backed off a little bit.|
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
So, wait...does THAT explain why my Drones and Protector bots absolutely have to, without fail, go and punch the AV in the face? Because I know they never used to do that.
Although I did notice the problem seemed to kick in around the time demons went live, and then never changed, so....? |
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Originally Posted by William_Valence
This is interesting, which enemies "Stand off"? I'd like very much to play with them, and see how they act. Is this in AE?
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Aren't Marksmen sniper enemies that can't move? Or am I thinking of something else?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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I'm pretty sure I've seen them move, although I can't specifically recall it happening right now. Council Marksmen aren't snipers, they're the minions with the -recharge bullets.
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Originally Posted by Void_Huntress
Aren't Marksmen sniper enemies that can't move? Or am I thinking of something else?
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Void: Agreed, but it got a helluva lot worse since Demons came out, and the tweaks they made to MMs then.
Hope: Council do have a genuine Sniper unit, found only in Founder Falls and even then quite rarely. I stumbled across one purely by chance.
I think some Sniper class mobs have a force immob...but I'm not sure, and not all of them seem to. I think?
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Marksmen will run away. I don't know if they use the Longbow Eagles self-fear or if they just have different AI programming, but they try to maintain maximum distance and will not ever close to melee. It gets frustrating to fight them sometimes, particularly when you're on a melee AT that tries to exploit AI simplicity to get them all to group around you.
De minimis non curat Lex Luthor.
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Counci...bra_Outer_Band
Scroll down till you get to Snipers. They are only ever encountered in Founders Falls, afaik.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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The instance ID associated with the "Rejoin Trial" action is cleared and recycled (or just corrupted due to a half-write) on the instance server but not on the players/league who suffered through the zone/instance crash, that's my guess? You could try and find out if all the missions that crashed trials ended up in were started after the trial crash (hence recycling of the instance ID's) or if they were started before you'd probably need more internal information about where and how the instance IDs were created. Certainly not easy to do as a black box.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
TPN seems to be having one of these now. Start guessing.
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My guess is that most of the server-side bugs come down to optimised but not "safe" memory handling. Which is very common in older games.
That said I _am_ a professional programmer and yet knowing how a bug happens vs identifying where to fix it in old legacy code are two completely different things so I don't begrudge them the delay in fixing.
I'm not really sure why a swinging power must have 'anchor points' and literally interact with the environment to look right.
I agree that swinging as high as you wish from 'nothing' would look odd, but it seems that could be fixed by setting a limit on swinging height to be no higher than nearby structures. Your swing line would indeed disappear some distance above you, not really attached to anything, but as long as you were never swinging higher than a nearby object, it seems to me the illusion that you were attached to something could be more palatable. There wouldn't be a limit to which direction you could go, provided you went no higher than a nearby object.
And if you were on completely flat ground, the power just wouldn't work (or maybe an athletic ninja-run type power took over instead)
I have no idea how difficult (SCR applies) it would be to constantly measure the height of nearby structures, nor how close you should have to be to them, but it does seem like it be less work than making tons of interactive anchor points. Maybe not...
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Another possibility is the player mission list is either a stack or a linked list, and something is improperly popping when the trial crashes, dropping everyone into a different mission than the original one when the bug occurs.|
Originally Posted by Serva_Obscura
The instance ID associated with the "Rejoin Trial" action is cleared and recycled (or just corrupted due to a half-write) on the instance server but not on the players/league who suffered through the zone/instance crash, that's my guess? You could try and find out if all the missions that crashed trials ended up in were started after the trial crash (hence recycling of the instance ID's) or if they were started before you'd probably need more internal information about where and how the instance IDs were created. Certainly not easy to do as a black box.
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Another possibility is that there is some partial fail safe code on the instance server itself that is trying to recover from a trial problem, but that code cannot recover the trial and so it does the only thing it can and dumps everyone into a different instance instead.
Another possibility is someone did a bad thing and wrote their own hash algorithm to generate instance tags, and we're seeing the result of collisions under certain specific situations (it would not be the first time a programmer improperly tried to roll their own something, and that something turned out to be horribly bad).
Most likely, my experience tells me its none of the above.
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You'd be talking about a potentially very computationally intensive process, which means that one power could suck up a significant amount of the server cycles serving maps with swinging characters.
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Originally Posted by Socorro
I'm not really sure why a swinging power must have 'anchor points' and literally interact with the environment to look right.
I agree that swinging as high as you wish from 'nothing' would look odd, but it seems that could be fixed by setting a limit on swinging height to be no higher than nearby structures. Your swing line would indeed disappear some distance above you, not really attached to anything, but as long as you were never swinging higher than a nearby object, it seems to me the illusion that you were attached to something could be more palatable. There wouldn't be a limit to which direction you could go, provided you went no higher than a nearby object. And if you were on completely flat ground, the power just wouldn't work (or maybe an athletic ninja-run type power took over instead) I have no idea how difficult (SCR applies) it would be to constantly measure the height of nearby structures, nor how close you should have to be to them, but it does seem like it be less work than making tons of interactive anchor points. Maybe not... |
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Pulling the entire mob sort of beats the purpose of pulling.
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Originally Posted by Durakken
Grapple Pull: Pulls a mob or multiple mobs to you. |
http://www.virtueverse.net/wiki/Shadow_Mokadara
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People still pull?
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Originally Posted by ShadowMoka
Pulling the entire mob sort of beats the purpose of pulling.
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BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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No doubt - I was essentially thinking it could be something comparable to how waypoint and mission entrance distances are constantly calculated relative to the movement of your toon. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
You'd be talking about a potentially very computationally intensive process, which means that one power could suck up a significant amount of the server cycles serving maps with swinging characters.
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I mean, the game already has to do this to a degree, in that it presents to your screen a view of surrounding structures relative to your toon's position to them (something is calculating this). The tech I was thinking of extrapolated from this. I agree that it could be more intensive than we imagine, but again, the game already does it to a large extent, so then perhaps not quite as much as we'd think.
*shrug* S.C.R. applies, as always.
It seem fairly obvious to me that the "spreadsheet devs" would would usually be generating new powers cannot implement anything like what has been suggested. Hence this would be up to a combination of the server and client coders, I don't know how many they have, but I'll bet it's not many.
It's also pretty obvious that there is no mechanism for a power to move a player in any way other than instantaneously to a pre-defined point or to a reticule.
It's pretty obvious that movement is a special case in the code (Its one of the few places that animations have their rate altered, along with character height) and that gravity is a special case. Hence I don't think it's a stretch to say that even Cryptic's-other-game-style grappling into nothing would be tough-to-the-point-of-monopolising-most-of-their-time simple due to the inverse parabola and collision issues.
Soooo.
/jranger
Although I did notice the problem seemed to kick in around the time demons went live, and then never changed, so....?