About AI land vehicle patrols - Early testing results

Buttface

OpenDayZ Rockstar!
To put it short: it's bad.

To put it long: I spent a few hours putting together the AI land vehicle patrol scripts yesterday. The process itself was relatively painless since I recycled about 75% of the code from the AI helicopter patrol scripts, but the initial test run was absolutely horrible.

What people on the Arma2 scripting and modding forums say about horrible AI drivers is very true - the AI are extremely horrible drivers, and all the road wrecks in DayZ doesn't help very much either. The AI have a very tough time navigating around the wrecks so they often crash around and blow out their tires. In my initial testing, towns such as Stary Sobor and Novy Sobor were basically death traps for land vehicle patrols.

The alternative would be adding vehicle patrols for custom spawned AI instead of having them patrol mapwide like helicopters. I will be seeing how that will go later this week.
 
if the wrecks spread all over the map are the major problem i would assume this is not a big deal for many servers. many server admins have removed the wrecks and junk anyway as i did.

so to have the option to switch vehicle patrols on and keeping in mind this will only work if wrecks are removed should be a usable workaround ...
 
Personally I do not like the idea of server admins having to go as far as removing wrecks because of the side effect of wiping out the military tents at Cherno, Stary, and wherever else. For Overwatch servers this also wipes out many of the buildings added with the mod.

At the moment the land patrols are queued for recycling as soon as the AI exit their vehicle for any reason, so the problem will fix itself if left alone. I will release an early test version of the land vehicle patrols when I add in a way to prevent recycling if the vehicle is not disabled, for example if they exit to engage a player.
 
Right now the AI vehicles are made near-immune to collision damage to compensate for their poor driving. Without it, an AI vehicle is disabled after a few minutes of driving. I actually had the vehicles recycle after being rendered undriveable, what happened was every land patrol being recycled every 5 minutes or so.
 
Is there a way of despawning the wreckage object that they collide with(wrecks and garbage only)? That might drag out the usability of the vehicle if they are hitting wreckage multiple times, and maybe clear common patrol routes a little.
 
You basically have 2 options.

1. Disable the server side object patch so AI can phase through the road wrecks. However this will mean AI can see and shoot through the tents at Stary, Cherno, etc.

2. Remove all wrecks altogether, however this will also wipe out the tents I listed above.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
 
Would it be possible to edit the random debris spawn to include a trigger spawned with the debris object? if so the AI vehicle could trigger a despawn of the debris. If I understand the mechanics correctly debris is only spawned when an object (/player?) is close, so it shouldn't hurt CPU too much.

Or have it trigger bandits exit vehicle, remove debris, get back in.

Not sure how feasible this is, just thinking out loud.
 
In vanilla DayZ there are over 9000 wreck objects, 2400 in Overwatch, so constant spawning and despawning makes this a rather unfeasible idea. The wrecks are only part of the problem, the other part is the bad driving ability of the AI.

Right now having the vehicles immune to collision damage seems like the best solution. I haven't seen any vehicles end up disabled so far, but they still often end up stuck in forested areas fairly often.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
 
have you tried this in epoch there are hardly any wrecks, not that it helps the problem but ffor us epoch admin we would love to see ai land patrols
 
I like the idea of AI being able to use vehicles. But since AI spawned vehicles won't save to the database (I hope they wouldn't), I'd honestly prefer to see an AI patrol car jack a vehicle from a player or just a random vehicle the AI come across.

I'd also make this a true/false setting and advise anyone of using this setting that they need to disable all of Rocket's added junk in the streets (even if it means tents/barracks/or any other Rocket added debri is removed). I say this becuase I'm a big map editor guy. I love building custom map additions and removing Rockets debri wouldn't hurt my feelings.

I also like the idea of crappy AI drivers too. If they steal a player vehicle or wreck a vehicle, it's up to the player to repair it if they want to keep it.
 
Next release will have a proof-of-concept version of the land vehicle patrols so people who are interested can see how the finished version may look like. Since its not a finished feature I just ask people to hold off on related bug reports until it is finished.

@cyrq I have seen that fix but it looks like something I can't simply package with DZAI. Unless I'm wrong.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
 
Back
Top