AI controlled units

[Deadmeat]

You guys are brave to implent AI controlled units for a FPS multiplayer only mod. In principle I think the idea is good. In practice I think you've got an awful lot of work to do to pull it off. From what I've seen over the years bots in online FPS's are very unpopular. People just don't like having them, I guess they prefer blasting other players as they can kill bots anytime offline. It can also be difficult to balance bots for online play for several reasons:

1) Different players have different levels of ability but you can't tailor the bot skill for individual players on a server. The bots will have to have a universal skill which means you run the risk of some players finding them ridiculously easy to dispatch while others might find them too difficult and give up.

2) Lag and latency. Players suffer from it. Bots don't. This kind of relates to how challenging to make the bots.

3) Having lots of bots may put strain on low end PC processing wise and can also eat up lots of bandwidth because that much more information is sent.

4) There are few things more irritating than watching an AI controlled ally completely ignore orders/objectives/opponents. Doesn't happen too often, especially with good AI, but the poor little buggars do sometimes get alittle confused  :wink:

I'm wondering about the fact that only one side has AI controlled units as well. This could be either and big advantage or a big disadvantage because of the some of the things I've mentioned above. I guess there would always be the possibility of giving the Marines AI Imperial Guard / Planetary Defense Force to even it up - or it could make it even worse. Still conceptually it makes more sense to have just the Tyranids having AI grunts.

Despite my nay saying I do like the idea of having bot grunts to boss around. I've also always enjoyed coop modes and think it's a shame that they're so rare as well.

[Razielk]

The bots we are planning on implementing arnt substitutes for players and probably wont be taking objectives, they are mainly there acting as the rebels did in HL2.  It means that we can get a swarm of nids with even players on each team and also gives the nid players a nice feature to play around with (ordering their minions to attack and defend etc).

Chrome or Elth will need to fill in the other gaps, I dont know enough about the mechanics of how they will be implemented  :roll:

[Typheron]

It should be noted that of all the things we need to do, the brood AI is functional thanks to Elth.

It works, ive seen it and played it although antlions and combine were standing in at the time. Its rathewr enjoyable to hit a bunch of antlions with a missle launcher and see them all fly in the air.

In its most basic sence you will aquire a brood by "buying" them. How this is done is undecided, but you will spawn either with a brood or with the capacity to lay your hands on one very quickly. They will be your wargear with different brood having access to different equipment, 3 main ones come to mind:

1# termaguants, main weapon the Fleshborer (will be the first brood to be running arround with the nid warriors) This is your ranged option.

2# spineguants, main weapon the spinefist (weapon will be a rapid firing thing but with very low accuracy at range) This is your close support option.

3# Hormiguants, Main weapons are their claws (slice and dice, nuff said) This is your close combat option, for those that like to look into the enemies eye as they gut him like a fish.

There will be others based off the tyranid brood types and all settings involving the brood have to be finalised once we get to the alpha testing phase but thats the plan.

[Wolf]

the broods from wot i kno arnt going to be amazingly strong either, 1 or 2 shots takes down a single gaunt, whereas u say people may find this to easy, the lil gaunts are just amde as a simple meatshield for the player controlled nid who will be big and strong and wipe out the human players.
also, the humans shudnt get bots for 1 reason, their Space Marines, the best the 40k has to offer in basic troops, but their arnt many of them, hence their outnumbered but never outgunned

[Deadmeat]

also, the humans shudnt get bots for 1 reason, their Space Marines, the best the 40k has to offer in basic troops, but their arnt many of them, hence their outnumbered but never outgunned

I know that, it was thinkng more along gameplay and balancing lines rather than background. That said, unless the rules have changed significantly since I stopped playing, a Tyranid Warrior was more than a match for a single Space Marine. Space Marines do have access to the best equipment the Imperium has to offer though, which helps compensate for this. There's also no reason why Space Marines wouldn't be working along side regular human soldiers bolstering the figting power and morale of the regular units - but for gameplay reasons I can see why they wouldn't necessarily fit in.

I hope the AI grunts do work because it will add something pretty unique to the mod. Still, I can envisage two scenario's - the grunts adding all sorts of little tactical considerations and helping to add variety / replayabilty to maps. I can see all kinds of cool things like leaving your brood to guard a specific area or sending them on a frontal assault while you sneak round the flank etc...
OR they become nothing more than irritating cannon fodder that has to be mown down before getting to grips with the good stuff, ie the opposing players. It may just come down to how the player's use them, in which case it's really out of the modder's hands - all they can do is provide the game and hope it's used as intended.

EDIT - one other thing that just occured. Imagine a game where you have 4 Marine players and 4 Tyranids. The Marines are dug in so the Tyranids decide to go for the classic frontal swarm attack. Now if each brood is 4 bots (just assuming because thats the number you can control in HL2), thats 16 bots and 4 Tyranids. Now if they all attack at the same time thats an awful lot of models the Marine players computers have to dispay at once. What if the Marines to the sensible thing and throw all there grenades? Thats alot of effects to render on top. Will you have to low poly counts for the bot creatures or somehow have a scaling poly count depending on how many are on screen? (I don't really know much about how the source engine works, I'm just writing as I think).

[Wolf]

i see the broods, adding more depth to the fighting, this wont be ur average team deathmatch, u have the outnumbered space marines working as a tactical squad out manovering the nid, and then is ee the nids, ambushing the space marine with sheer might of numbers. it cud go either way, making for a unique gameplay witch im hoping makes EX stand out

[Typheron]

I hope the AI grunts do work because it will add something pretty unique to the mod. Still, I can envisage two scenario's - the grunts adding all sorts of little tactical considerations and helping to add variety / replayabilty to maps. I can see all kinds of cool things like leaving your brood to guard a specific area or sending them on a frontal assault while you sneak round the flank etc...

thats the plan, and as i said before, they do work. In project behemoth (yes thats what i was going on about) where elith tested the code for them we sucessfully had them running arround with us going where we pointed and generally acting as we wanted.

The hope is that will be a usefull piece of kit for the nids with the space marine weaponary being their usefull kit.

did i mention you will have between 3-6 of the things at any one time?

We had 8 poeple on the behemoth test, all with antlion stand ins running arround and my gefore 4 MX with a 1.8GHZ processor was just fine, even when the weapons cheats went in and grenades and missles were everywhere.

*edit* forgot to mention how satisfying it was to blow up a room full of antlions with a missle launcher and want the bodies fly. In the room there were at least 4 players worth of antlions (my own included) and my comp was fine.

your lack of faith disturbs me...

[Deadmeat]

We had 8 poeple on the behemoth test, all with antlion stand ins running arround and my gefore 4 MX with a 1.8GHZ processor was just fine, even when the weapons cheats went in and grenades and missles were everywhere.

Hmm sounds promising - still having functional AI is one thing, implementing it is a whole new 'ball game' (as the yanks say).
 The Geforce 4 MX is a really old card isn't it ? (I think I've got the MX 420). And it ran OK even with large amounts of models on screen?
I'd buy that for a dollar.....

[Eltharyon]

I want to clarify several things:


1. Yes, we do have "functional" brood AI already, although it is pretty basic it demonstrates whats possible. Effectively you can spawn with a bunch of nids, these nids will then protect you and will follow your orders (move, stay, engage target, follow friendly target).

2. Internally this has become known as "Project Behemoth", because thats the name I (foolishly) used for the test mod.

"WH40K Source: Behemoth" actually is a theoretical cooperative mod themed around the battle for macragge. With a 98% probability it will never see the light of day, however, its offspring "WH40K Source: Behemoth - Attack on Tyran" is something I'm seriously considering to kick off as a summer project. Stay tuned.

[Khargoth]

Hmmm, you guys should watch the Bots on Counter-Strike Source sometime, they are works of coding art. The follow orders (sometimes randomly going rogue, but they at least have the courtesy to radio in, telling you where to stick your orders...). What is really amazing, however, is the map analysis engine Valve have worked into the bots. When a new map is introduced, the AI takes a few minutes to scan the map for accessible areas to create movement paths, has a few criteria for things like snipe spots and areas of cover, as well as calculating likely engaegement points. Very impressive indeed. Watching one through first person, you'd swear it's a human, the only giveaways are tad-too-smooth mouse movement, and bullseye-accuracy. At the same time they are rather 'dumb', they don't have 360 degree vision, and you are quite capable of sneaking up on them. When gunfire and explosions are 'heard', the bots tend to start wandering in that direction, and I've managed to ambush a few (and been caught in pincer manuevers myself, damn multi-accessway maps). I'm sure Valve would be rather annoyed if you ripped off with their Bot AI, but it's a good inspiration to know that it's possible.

I like the idea of using the Rebel AI to control the 'nids very much, simplistic and effective. Hopefully you can teach the bots to leap over obstacles, push things aside, attack on a broad frontage and maybe even co-ordinate attacks with other broods under the Synapse's control. For example, a Synapse is in control of a unit of Hormogaunts and Spinegaunts. The Synapse gives the attack order. Instead of blindly running foward, the spinegaunts advance behind the Hormogaunts, giving cover fire and softening up a few juicy targets before the Hormogaunts hit.

For the Marines, maybe something more like the radio command system from CS. Far simpler of course, maybe simple stuff like Hold This Position (the bot already coded to seek the nearest 'cover' or stay in the open if nothing useful is nearby), Seek and Destroy (does small-radius patrols of the area, giving a radio response when it encounters any enemies), Follow Me (self explanatory),  and Attaaaack! (charge foward along pre-programmed attack paths, attacks anything that it can see, radios response when it reaches the 'objective')

Comments?

[Typheron]

there are no marine bots, its just humans alone on that side, humans with big freaking guns.

thanks for the clarification there Eltharyon on the project: behemoth stuff.

[ChromeAngel]

EDIT - one other thing that just occured. Imagine a game where you have 4 Marine players and 4 Tyranids. The Marines are dug in so the Tyranids decide to go for the classic frontal swarm attack. Now if each brood is 4 bots (just assuming because thats the number you can control in HL2), thats 16 bots and 4 Tyranids. Now if they all attack at the same time thats an awful lot of models the Marine players computers have to dispay at once. What if the Marines to the sensible thing and throw all there grenades? Thats alot of effects to render on top. Will you have to low poly counts for the bot creatures or somehow have a scaling poly count depending on how many are on screen? (I don't really know much about how the source engine works, I'm just writing as I think).

Under the current plan in a 4VS 4 game if all nid player chose to play as warriors they would get no brood creatures at all.  If all 4 nid players chose to play as "Hive nodes" it would be 16 gaunts (and no warriors) VS 4 marines.  I hope everyone agrees this is isnt nearly as unbalanced as the scenario Deadmeat outlined.

[Deadmeat]

Under the current plan in a 4VS 4 game if all nid player chose to play as warriors they would get no brood creatures at all.  If all 4 nid players chose to play as "Hive nodes" it would be 16 gaunts (and no warriors) VS 4 marines.  I hope everyone agrees this is isnt nearly as unbalanced as the scenario Deadmeat outlined.

Sorry, I think you've slightly misunderstood what I meant - I was refering to the strain that might be put on a low end pc rendering that much action at the same time on one screen.

That said I was under the impression that all tyranid players would get a brood in addition to their own character (thats what I gathered from the web site description). Do you mean a player will either get to play themselves or just get a brood to boss around? The list of playable tyranids was Warrior, Lictor, Carnifex and the other one - but if the warrior gets no brood I don't see how any of the others can either. Have I just completely mis-understood how this will work?

[Typheron]

Its down to balance mainly, this stuff has still to be decided cos we dont know how things are going to play when we put everything together.

you will always have control of a brood, but several factors will decide what kind of player class you get.

If the situtation is that the marines are lsoing for instance then you will only get access to a hive node class, which you basically controll a brood but have no direct weapons or world interaction. The beauty of this is you wont die, but your brood will and you will have to get it back before you can continue to attack.

you will really be the hive mind.

[ChromeAngel]

Any of the Tyranid player class can have a brood.   Iin a balanced game most classes have no creatures in their brood (except the hive node who has 4).  However if the tyranids are outnumbered the team will get 4 brood creatures per player they are lacking.  For example it was 4 Tyranids VS 5 marines, each of the Tyranid players would get 1 extra brood creature, to compensate for their lack of players.

If the marines are outnumbered they will get 4 (really very lethal) grenades per player they are lacking. In this way I hope inbalanced teams that un-avoidably occur in team games will actualy provide interesting variations on the gameplay, rather than frustraition on the part of the small team.

If performace issues occur during testing or after the fist release we can address it thorugh the use of LOD models.     Although I doubt it will come to that, I have great faith in the optimization of our models and in the Source engine.