bot improvements mod

[Gireen]

A dumb thing bots do is they focus only on there current goal and ignore everything else. That makes it super easy to kill them if they flee or attack a building. At the moment its not possible to have a bot react to attacks and resume its task it the danger is over.
It might be good to have a state variable, that the behavior tree can act different depending on the current state.

[illwieckz]

• human bots will equip (armors, backpacks, grenades) before going to repair stuff

For armors I can see the need, but for grenade, they may just waste the money if killed while repairing, right? Is there a way to do selective equipment?

[killing time]

Just tried it a bit.

In the currently deployed version there is a bug causing missiles not to be spawned, meaning you can't throw grenades, and pulse rifles, flamers and rocketpods don't shoot. This was caused by a recently committed bug on master which was already fixed. You can fix the bug by either one of rebasing your code on master, or putting the 0.52.1 asset packages on your server.

A noticeable path-setting issue I saw (not necessarily a regression, just something I noticed) was that alien bots often rushed out on the path from the alien base to the human base when they had <50% health.

[killing time]

Suggestion: Have a minimum health percentage to evolve. If you evolve with low health and get in a fight right away, then you will probably end up wasting your evos. If you don't get in a fight, then evolving at that time did not benefit you.

Something I've talked about before, but was not mentioned in this thread - human bots sometimes won't fire at aliens in plain sight. This can happen if humans are on the ledge in the karith elevator room and aliens are on the other ledge. (I think you said it happens because there must be a mesh path to an enemy?)

When playing today, the human bots seemed kind of cowardly sometimes. As a mantis, I did around 30-40 damage to a human bot with light armour close to its base and it fled back in.

I feel like the bots' aiming skill with Painsaw might be too high compared to their skills in other areas.

[afontain]

Ok, so here's a part of my todolist with ideas you can be interested to implement. You may have fixed or partially fixed some of these already.

• You should check that when, say, an human is hurt, they add the enemy to the enemy queue (look for enemyQueue_t, I guess). Maybe it's not the actual bug and it happens only when you attack an human healing (I think I've confirmed it's not though). Currently you can sometimes kill an human bot and they don't even seem to notice as long as they don't see you in their view cone.

I'm thinking, as we make the bots stronger at every skill, that we should also make them easier at low skill.

• Maybe continue firing a bit after the target has exited the pointer? As a mean to have them waste more ammo and spend more time reloading. If you look at newcomers, you will notice they are often trigger-easy.
• Have bots forget healing even exist at very low skill. Bots used to roam the map with low health, and that meant an easy human sandwich with 40hp from times to times. In low skill matches, this is not a bug, it's a feature!
• Have bots buy weapon before armor at low skill. Every newcomer does that. This seem like a good mistake to lower the bot skill.
• Have bots evolve even at low health.
• Have bots do fast retreat at high skill only. This thing is insanely powerful. That's probably not just a bot bug, mind you.
• Have bots do all the stupid things stupid players do (yeah, I know, easy to say )

And as a last point, I'd very much like to have a "bot skill" tree :) I've talked about it a bit, but here's something written on something less ephemeral than IRC.

The idea would be that bots would have some number of skills to spend here and there, and those would unlock the smart behaviour, enable good heuristics or on the other hand, disable bad behaviours. It would help give bots some personallity so they don't all feel the same, and don't feel too much the same from a game to another.

Code: Select all

base
        -> healing
                -> smart healing (with good heuristics)
                -> knows how to run 
                -> fast retreat
        -> better weapon choices
                -> can buy grenades
        -> knows how to reload
                -> buy armor before weapon
        -> …

[SuperDupont]

If you see Human bots on Yocto don't go to the medi-station, it's because this map is vertical, and bots can think there is still enemies nearly, but they are far away, high.

Thanks for all improvements

[killing time]

I played a bit on the SK5 server. Problems that jumped out at me:

• Bots often retreat when it's not a good idea. Like a dretch is coming at me, I hit it 3-4 times with a rifle, and then it turns around and runs back right before it could have got me. In general, when you're going 1-on-1 against a bot it's like you only have to take it down to half its health and then the rest comes for free, since it just runs away without fighting (and not fast enough to actually escape). The retreating is sometimes effective when I'm fighting several enemies at once and the others prevent me from finishing off the injured one.
  
  Perhaps a quick hack to improve things slightly - disable retreating for dretches, since they have little to lose.
  
  This behavior is also on master, not a bug specific to the mod. Actually it seemed slightly improved in the mod, in one respect: retreating human bots tried to shoot at me a bit when I attacked them during their retreats. On master retreating human bots are completely oblivious and don't fight. Is this something changed in the mod?
• Bots ignore enemies standing in certain places. For example as an alien, I can stand on a big box near the human base's interior entrance and none will shoot me. Of course this bug is already well-known and has been there forever.
• Infinite equipment-changing loop. A human bot was stuck at the armory constantly going click-click-click... Possibly a mod-specific bug.