More clever ground AI?

[msalama]

As it is now (v1.1.1.1), the ground units when under fire will just disperse for a bit and then stay put waiting to get picked up one by one. Any possibility of making them more clever and f.ex. dash for the nearest crevice / depression instead of just dumbly sitting there?

[Nate--IRL--]

As it is now (v1.1.1.1), the ground units when under fire will just disperse for a bit and then stay put waiting to get picked up one by one. Any possibility of making them more clever and f.ex. dash for the nearest crevice / depression instead of just dumbly sitting there?

 

I agree it would be nice to have it looked at. However you can stop them dispersing if you want by setting them not to react to threats in the Mission editor.

 

Nate

[GGTharos]

Possibility yes, but it isn't an easy feat by any means at all. This is actually a difficult AI problem, and the seemingly simple thing you mentioned is more complicated than you can imagine.

 

As it is now (v1.1.1.1), the ground units when under fire will just disperse for a bit and then stay put waiting to get picked up one by one. Any possibility of making them more clever and f.ex. dash for the nearest crevice / depression instead of just dumbly sitting there?

[slug88]

Possibility yes, but it isn't an easy feat by any means at all. This is actually a difficult AI problem, and the seemingly simple thing you mentioned is more complicated than you can imagine.

 

Indeed, I can't think of a single game that effectively solves the problem of finding cover in a free form 3d environment. It's an issue not only of programming, but of limited CPU resources. We'll have photorealistic graphics and highly detailed physics modelling of all game entities long before we have realistic intelligence modelling.

 

Furthermore, I wonder if seeking cover in crevices is really more intelligent than the current behavior. Were I a tanker under air attack, my strategy would be to bail out and run as far and fast as my legs could muster, with the intent of returning to the tank once the attack passed. Trying to find cover from above in a tank seems like a losing proposition, especially given the very limited situational awareness that a tank crew is likely to have.

Edited June 29, 2012 by slug88

[159th_Viper]

....Trying to find cover from above in a tank seems like a losing proposition, especially given the very limited situational awareness a tank crew is likely to have.

 

Exactly.

 

If you're spotted you're dead. Nowhere to run and even less places to hide, unless you make like a womble.

[Pikey]

How about a way to break out into scripting like we did with Operation Flashpoint all those years ago? As long as you can define under fire, prone, nearest 'object', distance, degrees, a way of identifying target and weapon type, distance to target, appropriate number of force and line of sight you could have a half go at it.

[GGTharos]

You could try hiding near buildings or under foliage, but this is also not easy. Pathfinding is definitely not an easy thing to do, and before even that, recognition of a place to hide is even more difficult in -some- situations.

[Grimes]

Its an issue of determining what is cover and how it would be most effective to a units own survivability. How that relates to a tank on the battlefield, I honestly don't know. Find the nearest building to limit the aircrafts attack options? But yes it does come down to figuring out how the AI would make a decision. Some games (mostly Unreal Engine powered) solve this issue by creating a massive mesh of possible movement nodes. Each node has different properties and is meant for different types of movement. One of these properties is basically "cover." You know when your character is attached to a wall in Gears of War, Mass Effect 2/3, or Rainbow Six Vegas 1/2? Thats cover. Its one way to do it... but I'm not sure how well a similar principal could be applied on the scale of DCS.

[159th_Viper]

I've mentioned this before, but what prevents implementation of the command where, if a group of units are attacked, they disperse and 20 seconds later proceed in a direct line (or as close as) to the next waypoint. At the very least they are mobile with a small chance of escape as opposed to the 'sitting duck' scenario at present.

[Pikey]

I "think" the issue is the trigger of being attacked rather than damaged. Or commonly known as effective enemy fire. With that you can at least force movement or do a number of other things. Just need it to show up in the triggers as a repeated action, maybe add a timer to start once it occurred to keep the units from running forever.

[Pikey]

Hmm at least some of what i'm saying is mince, theres an event called "on shot" I havent tried. There is also "run script", not sure what could be done.

 

I'll have a play around in Editor. One of the things that did seem tricky was how to loop waypoints for ground units or at least move out of sync.

 

Flashpoint you just tended to ignore waypoints and just move the group to a coordinate and brak out of the route completely so you can move in non linear fashions.

[VAOZoky]

Only thing that comes to my mind is smokescreens and ir jammers

[Sceptre]

What slug88 said. When I am playing ArmA 2 and my tank comes under an A-10A attack, I just get out and run and is the A-10 does not wreck my tank I will get back in after the plane is long gone.

(Yes I play as a Russian):)

 

Speaking of ArmA 2, when you do air attacks on AI tanks in that game, they don't get out but they run away. If the tank is hit and it's going to blow, then they'll get out.

[FatSlapper]

Doesn't modern tanks know when they are being "painted"? Isn't that the time to run? I remember in the second gulf war seeing so called hidden tanks being plinked and seeing the crew run like scalded dogs right before the tank was "maved", how did they know? Maybe when one in a group got hit they started bailing but it did look like when they were locked they ran...

[Sceptre]

Yes it is possible to put a laser warning receiver, like the Ka-50's, in a tank. It would work with laser guided bombs, but not mavericks.

[Krebs20]

Were there laser mavs used in the Gulf War? Also, doesn't the Hellfire missile have an option to be fired using laser guidance when the radar is impracticable or inop?

[GGTharos]

Usually the laser hellfire is used, AFAIK, the reason being that while the radar hellfire /is/ tremendously useful, it has issues that make it perhaps more valuable in a much denser battlefield than what happened in the GW, where high volume of fire was not needed of the Apache.

 

Right now, you don't get multiple seekers in a single hellfire.

 

Were there laser mavs used in the Gulf War? Also, doesn't the Hellfire missile have an option to be fired using laser guidance when the radar is impracticable or inop?

[Wolfie]

Speaking of ArmA 2, when you do air attacks on AI tanks in that game, they don't get out but they run away. If the tank is hit and it's going to blow, then they'll get out.

 

Arma 2 has the best AI intelligence I have seen yet. It should definitely be looked at to see how they do it. It would be great to have that level of intelligence in DCS.

[Nate--IRL--]

Arma 2 has the best AI intelligence I have seen yet. It should definitely be looked at to see how they do it. It would be great to have that level of intelligence in DCS.

 

Certainly - but remember what ARMA simulates - you can't expect a flight sim to match that in short order.

 

Nate

[GGTharos]

No need to look into Arma's AI exactly. DCS AI is fairly simple; it does things, it can be made to do a lot of things as well, but it isn't terribly smart. Can it be made smarter? Yes, but this will require a huge investment in time.

 

Arma 2 has the best AI intelligence I have seen yet. It should definitely be looked at to see how they do it. It would be great to have that level of intelligence in DCS.

[msalama]

If you're spotted you're dead. Nowhere to run and even less places to hide, unless you make like a womble.

Well this is what would happen IRL too if you left your vehicles in open terrain... but yeah, OK, seeing as this is indeed a hairy technical problem as GGTharos and others have kindly pointed out, then how about at least putting in this thing IL-2 had back in the day where tiny dudes ran from their vehicles if you strafed a convoy :)