Ai Elaboration

Ich-Henker · Flamethrower **Joined**: 06 Aug 2015 **Location**: Germany

Hey,

is there a possible solution with future Ares developments to enhance the AI capabilities of pathfinding?

I know a lot about the AI flags and what you can manipulate like stray, or gathering distance or quitting ai scripts that couldnt be dissolved in rulesmd.ini and aimd.ini and I couldn't in one years work get a solution for all(!) map instances. Infact each map with a lot of water is highly in danger of being unplayable with the AI.

*If the script says regroup at friendly base and right in front of the base is a lake it can result in the AI get stuck.

*Bridges are likely to get clustered.

*Ai can be stuck if map resolves around a huge lake, where there is an island in the middle and the AI is stuck because it thinks that the island is the gathering point before attacking.

Worst thing is the resulting lag - there must be a way to code the wayfinding better?

Ideas people?

AlexB · Commander **Joined**: 31 May 2010 **Location**: Germany

Pathfinding is complex, and messing with it from the outside doesn't make it easier. I'm not sure it's possible to change this part of the engine at all, without breaking previous behavior. Actually, I think the maps should suffice the pathfinding algorithm that's there, not the other way around. Almost every algorithm can be fed input where it performs considerably worse than usual, and algorithms that can solve edge cases better tend to be slower in common cases. Thus, there's the danger of swapping one evil for another.

There were plans to make AISafeDistance, Stray, and RelaxedStray more customizable, but Ares does not extend TeamTypes, Triggers, Actions and Events in any way yet. That is, there are no new tags or settings for them, though some behavior is changed (which doesn't need to store any new data).

Stray and RelaxedStray in particular are spread all over the code. This indicates there was a small function that did the distinguishing, and the compiler inlined it (that is, the function call is removed and replaced with the function's contents directly). This means that the fix has to applied all over the place.

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