f13.net forums - If there are any GW dev's lurking..FIX THIS!

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April 23, 2024, 01:05:23 PM

we're back, baby

Ok, one thing that is really pissing me off is the stupidity of the missions that are obviously designed for multi-human. It's been said that the primary focus of GW is NOT PvE, yet some of the missions that are required to unlock progress are designed expressly to never work unless you have a human team to perform the mission.

Added to this, fix the healer's AI, so that she freaking stops running right up into the focus of fire--or at -least- tries to get out of AE attacks. Up to level 19 I still haven't been able to have 2 healers, so it's a mission breaker when the healer henchman runs right up into 2 melee plus an ae damage zone and gets wiped immediately.

Just a simple "hold position/hold formation" command would make things much more appropriate--and even though this isn't an RTS game, when you are running 6+ henchmen you either need good AI, or some method of control.

Rofl. In addition, I concur.

Just give us Lina earlier.

Right now I'd settle for 'don't stand in the fire kthx'.

How many times have I bitched on TS about fucking Alesia? God damn, she is stupid. My sister could write better AI routines (ok, not really, but still...).

Solution? Don't make her go into melee range to use her ranged-weapon staff.

I cannot honestly understand what the AI routine for Alesia is. She doesn't need close range for her heals. Shit, she doesn't even need to toss out those attack spells. Why is she constantly running into the midst of huge swaths of shit? She spends most of her energy healing her damn self because she runs into the fray like she's wearing plate.

It pretty much only gets worse. I found that after Sanctum Cay it rapidly became more difficult to run missions with six henchmen and a guildie - and that's even when the guildie is a good Mo/Me healer. Post-Ascension, it actually is impossible, since the henchmen only behave as if they were 3/5ths infused or something like that, meaning that Spectral Agony still hands them their ass on a platter.

I'm not sure whether the missions are becoming that much harder or the pick-up idiots I've been using to fill out groups are that much dumber, but my success rate on missions has plummeted to less than 1 out of 6 tries. Working, infused henchies would be manna from heaven.

Quote from: Yoru on June 15, 2005, 10:35:17 AM

since the henchmen only behave as if they were 3/5ths infused

I still find it a bigger problem that as soon as you reach the islands, henchmen insist on STANDING IN FIRE. Hurrumpf.

Quote from: Stephen Zepp on June 14, 2005, 08:51:55 PM

Added to this, fix the healer's AI, so that she freaking stops running right up into the focus of fire--or at -least- tries to get out of AE attacks. Up to level 19 I still haven't been able to have 2 healers, so it's a mission breaker when the healer henchman runs right up into 2 melee plus an ae damage zone and gets wiped immediately.

In retrospect I think you are right. I didn't really notice it so much one I loaded a resurrect spell as one of my required 8 for PvE missions. I was always rezzing the healer at least 1 per mission; and sometimes, all the henchies.

You have monk skills; when it goes south keep your self alive then use that one

Xilren

Put Sugarpie Honeybunch on your friends list. I'll be happy to help you with any mission. I'm still missing several bonuses on her.

I started a little W/Mo (The Missus). So far it feels like easy mode. She's just gotten to Ascalon, however, so what do I know?

Mhenlo is far, far worse than Alesia. A lot of the times, he doesn't even heal. And he gets stuck all the damn time.

While of extremely lower importance, the npc's not casting ae spells, or running away whenever you finally get mobs corralled for an ae is quite fun as well!

It is rough to right a well rounded AI, I know this--but damn, if you don't have the time to really polish them up, then write an interface where WE can command the henchmen. Hell, just a HEAL ME! emote would do wonders. Or simply give us direct control of their positioning.

I NEVER bring along melee henchman any longer. With the asstastic linked mobs that you have to wait 5 minutes for them to get enough separation so you can pull just one group, I can't afford to have two meatshields charge into aggro range of 2-3 other groups and blow the mission.

Quote from: Xilren's Twin on June 15, 2005, 11:27:50 AM

Quote from: Stephen Zepp on June 14, 2005, 08:51:55 PM

Xilren

Heh...not specced for heals...guess I need to just go ahead and do that to survive this shit!

The best part is the Ring of Fire mission with henchmen where you have to cross the double lava volcano area with lava imps on the far site.

Quote from: Krakrok on June 15, 2005, 04:24:21 PM

The best part is the Ring of Fire mission with henchmen where you have to cross the double lava volcano area with lava imps on the far site.

What? You *cross* the lava? Why not just dance around in the middle of it like Mhenlo, I'm sure he has some kind of secret plan.

What's up with Mhenlo not ressing? I had to end a mission because the imbecile simply would not res the other healer.

I hate him worse than Alesia, and I hate her so much I made a monk just to try to understand what her fucking problem was. I don't play my healer, though, because soloing is very painful and I think I hate half the people who play this game so I don't like to party with random strangers much.

Quote from: Xanthippe on June 15, 2005, 06:29:42 PM

I think I hate half the people who play this game

Only half? Wow. You, madam, are more forgiving than I.

Interestingly, this fiasco with the AI has kickstarted the AI dev planning I've had planned for next year for my own project--and I'll probably do a discussion article on the higher level aspects of team based AI design. I'm not an expert at AI by any means, but I do have some decent background, and it would be interesting to me to hear input on the design requirements from this community...so hopefully I'll be able to get something put together and into Schild's hands in the next month or so.

I have always that it'd be fun to be able to program your allies like an email filter.

Healer Rules:
If {SelfHealth} is below 50%, use Heal Touch on {Self}
If {SelfHealth} is below 50%, State is Panic
If {AllyHealth} is below 40%, use Word of Healing {Ally}
If {AllyConditon} is Poisoned or Deseased, use Mend Condition on {Ally}
If {AllyHealth} is below 70%, use Word of Healing on {Ally}
if {AllyStatus} is Dead, use Rebirth on {Ally}
If {EnemiesRange} is near, State is Attack.
ELSE State is Follow

The rules go the from top to bottom, dropping through to the next one if the condition isn't met or the abilty is unavailable. Restart at the top once a condition is met.

Quote from: tazelbain on June 16, 2005, 08:44:34 AM

Interestingly, I bet this is actually pretty close to the system that is currently implemented...and the reason I say that is because there are many states and conditions that a fall through like this wouldn't handle. Here's an example:

If the above list is exactly what is used, the AI healer would absolutely move into fire if told to, and then sit there until she got below 50% health, and then would never do anything else until she ran out of mana--ignoring heals on other party members, etc. Of course, we see this type of thing from the healers all the time!

What really needs to be worked out is a design that handles whitespace tracking of current events across the group itself, and sets both priorities and interrupt conditions (or override conditions) to properly handle shifting priorities and conditions. Additionally, instead of being a "polling" system, where only the current state of each of the characters in the party is checked on a timed basis, you should explore an event based system where combat events are placed in a whitespace that all of the team's AI can access and update. For example, the following sequence of events happens in a fight:

--NPC A takes a series of damage events, 3 total, each of 100-ish points.
----each event is posted separately to the white space, as a type CombatDamage:Physical, Target:NPC A, CombatDamageSource:Mob A, CombatDamageType:melee, with the first one getting a priority of 0, the second 1, and the third 3--because the NPC A started with full health, but now has less than 1/3 (hypothetical).

--Previously, as the group was formed, each NPC (and player) "registered" with the white space manager the ability to handle specific combat event types and classes. For example, NPC A would be registered for self heal, light (signet), the healer NPC would be registered with just about all of the combat event types, and then the player character, if appropriate, would be registered for combat even types as well.

--each registered NPC/PC AI would be notified of the combat events that pertain to them, and be able to make decisions based on the information in the event, as well as other events that are ongoing. For the first one for example, a priority 0 would almost certainly be completely ignored, and even a priority 1 might be ignored if, for example, their were higher priority/total amount events going on. However, the priority 3 event might even cause an override condition of interrupting a ressurect spell the healer might be casting, and immediately handling the high priority events.

----this would also allow tracking of multiple healers within the group--if, for example, the NPC just used their signet of healing a single tick earlier, a polling system would cause the healer npc to cast a high priority heal on NPC A--even though the actual events have already been handled. Alternatively, if event 1 and 2 had been handled already (but still in process), the healer npc could simply "top off" the player, or possibly decide to do a completely different action--say, cast pacify on the attacking mob, instead of healing the damaged NPC.

It sounds complicated, but once you put together a system like this, and properly classify (and recognize) the various combat events, your team as a whole will work MUCH better together, and the AI actions will make sense--and more correctly duplicate what "real" players will do.

And yes, I absolutely agree a "good" AI will let the players modify the behaviour via some form of goal and priority modification. We've seen games all the way from Robot Battle back in the Apple II days where users actually right AI routines of some form or another, and this is an area that has been basically dropped in the game industry for a long time...yet now more than ever it makes sense to implement.

Zep (sorry, just gave you a nickname), do you see the IA doing sum-based decision making (periodiodically making an action decision based upon a sum of events), in response to events, both?

If event based, how will you reduce the overhead of all the the event processing? A mix-mode model (e.g. postioning decisions are made periodically, combat and command-response actions are event driven) seems most flexible but I'd worry about events that do not get processed immediately causing odd behavior.

I've had an idea for some time about a model where a AI server did the AI processing for every active object (from dumb to smart) and ran on a different server (for load balancing). The object would register itself with the AI server which would set the weights of its processing (how smart (eval cycles or process priority), how passive/aggressive/timid, etc) and periodically query (with the parameters being the current event sum for that object) the AI server for an action.

Quote from: Typhon on June 23, 2005, 05:44:04 AM

My above design was pretty off the cuff, hadn't really thought out the specifics. Basically yes, you would want to have decisions made on some sort of history of events, as well as possibly replacing/summing events over a short period of time to give a "highest priority" event.
Regarding your AI server idea, yes it looks like a good one...we plan on doing something very similar in our project. While you get a lot of network overhead with the server traffic for each event, as well as needing a good way to model all of the information the AI's need to make their decisions based on what is going on in the primary game server, the distributed processing is pretty attractive.

I really would like there to be some sort of player control for the henchmen. Like if there's a nearby enemy group, and it's just me and Alesia alive and I'm trying to get her to bring the rest of them back to life, it'd be really nice if they wouldn't pull the enemies.

Quote from: Llava on June 25, 2005, 02:09:21 PM

I'd take a "Aggressive" "Passive" and "Defensive" setting for each henchmen.

Teamspeak.

Strazos - "URGH...FUCKING ALESIA!!"

10 minutes later...

Strazos - "Ugh...fucking...Guess who just Died AGAIN!?"

3 minutes later...

Strazos - "Fucking A, I HATE you Alesia!"

We need more control over the henchmen plskthx.

What really irritates me is that she'll get 3 or 4 enemies on her, then run around in circles, not getting them off her but dragging them out of the Fire Storm, Lava Font, whatever else I threw down to melt them. Great, now you're dying and they're just fine. Smart move.