AI Land Vehicle Movement

T

TheZog

New Member
I have some questions about how the AI land vehicles driving and spawn/despawn works.
I'll often notice that several of the AI driven vehicles have spawned out in the woods or someplace that they can not drive out of, like a steep location.
Is there a despawn timer on vehicles that don't move for a certain period of time to so that they have a chance of starting out someplace near a road?
If not then I think a timer would be a great idea, it could cover cases where the vehicles don't move enough because they are stuck at road debris or just plain aren't moving at all.
I've had to increase the number of AI units to cover for the fact that so many become stuck and unmoving far away from any action/town/road.


As always, thanks for making DZAI!
 
The land vehicle patrols right now are based on the helicopter spawn scripts, so there are sure to be many problems.

Because the existing land vehicle patrol is a demonstration only, these problems and others are expected. I will have time to resume developing this feature in the beginning of May, so you will have to hang on until then.

For now I am collecting user feedback about the vehicle patrols and adding them to my mental to do list.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
 
To follow up this post, these are the solutions I have thought of for solving the issues you have listed:

  1. Vehicles being spawned and stuck on non-road areas: the spawning procedure will be changed so that DZAI will not spawn a land vehicle if it can't find a suitable road position. Instead, it will add the vehicle to the respawn queue and try to spawn later until it succeeds. So unlike the helicopter patrols which are spawned one after the other upon server start, the AI land vehicles may spawn in several attempts over time.
  2. Vehicles being stuck in general (ie: impassible roadblock). I am thinking of adding a waypoint check to the AI vehicle re-ammo/refuel script to check if it's had the same waypoint for a certain length of time. If the waypoint has remained the same for a certain amount of time, then select another waypoint without having to arrive at the original one.
 
Right now the despawn countdown begins on a vehicle as soon as the AI inside exit (they won't go back in), but this is planned to change to allow AI to exit and re-enter their vehicles.
 
I'm looking forward to the AI having the ability to re-enter their vehicles, it will make them that much more life like. It's already a bit eerie watching a pair of headlights go down the road at night as it is.
Is there any chance of it being quick and/or easy to just add a timed poll as an interm solution? The poll would read an un-exited vehicle's x,y and if those values don't change by an appreciable amount after say 180secs, then have that vehicle despawn? Because the checks would be infrequent I wouldn't think it would put much of a load on the client/server, but am unfamiliar with ARMA code event or loop handling. Maybe you could get by with polling the results of (x+y), since I don't think it would need to be very accurate as we are just checking to see if the vehicle is really moving at all.
I of course understand if that won't work or you just don't have the time until May.
 
This is something I'd rather not do a rush job on. As I have said before, the entire vehicle patrol system is a demonstration only and something that I threw together in a day just to see how the real deal could look like. The only reason it's part of DZAI right now is I didn't want to be a jerk and remove something that is functional on a basic level.
 
Ah OK.
Well it's a welcome addition and quite fun even with its quirks, so thanks for leaving it in!
 
Buttface I know land vehicles is only in demonstration mode as of now but upgrading that would be a HUGE increase for DZAI. 1.9.9 is so good now. Fixing and enhancing the Land vehicle AI would be awesome. I for one have ZERO problem with AI driving thru the woods or mountains. Hey players do it. AI could be looking for player camps, hunting or something. As long as their path fnding around trees is ok I dont see anything wrong with it.
I freaked the other day when a military offroad flew by me stopped then 4 heavily armed dudes jumped out. Or when I pasted a group in a UAZ going the other way and they jumped out. One guy had a MG136 and fired it at my Humvee but missed. Whew.

what I'd like to see...which tye dont do now is this.

If they jump out the vehicle to engage you and you run or take off in your own vehilce. I want to see them jump back in their cars or whatever and chase you down or come after you in the vehicle for a set about of time or distance. Saying chase you 500 meters or for 30 seconds. right now if they jump out they seem to only chase you on foot they dont get back in until your gone. Then they just go back on their normal patrols.
 
Love them too. i introduced them to the server 2 days ago. I cant wait to get reports that players see them drive by and ask for a ride only to get mowed down. Lol.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top