We need new AI Pathing System for UT3!!!!

[Kantham]

This guy is crazy , path node don't need to be removed!! And they are not that painfull , the bot only need apointment, YES , but that's it.

Huh?

UNR3AL remind you something?

 

[The_Head]

how does seperate bot-files for each level sound? like , for example in a server that runs bots , the players movements can be tracked , recorded, and fed into the botpathing AI , and new pathnodes and triggers are formed as the bots follow where the players have been and what they have done to get there, and what they have done once they got there... or does this sound like an idea which some company tried a looong time ago and it didnt work and they gave up on it and nobody heard of it ever since

Sounds like an interesting Idea.
Can you imagine if servers tracked all movememnt by humans and bots and fed it onto the internet. And you could then download inteligence packs for the AI.
That would be cool

path node don't need to be removed!! And they are not that painfull , the bot only need apointment, YES , but that's it.

Agreed. Pathnodes are easy. Time consuming, but still easy nonetheless.

 

[Kantham]

Thinking for a moment about bot support without path , just immagine how much CPU it would use for only 1 bot.

 

[The_Head]

Ouch.

This game is going to be a resource hog as it is from the looks of things.
/starts saving.....

 

[shadow_dragon]

To add, in the artical, I read the bots will be able to take voice commands, and you can use location names in them, the problem is, where do those names come from? My only guess, is some sort of tag in the map, for a zone. I believe this is already in UT, seeing as alot of maps I have been in, will say X person is at say, the blue base, when you look at the scoreboard (on team based games at least). This probably means mappers need to make sure to label the zones well.

I have a feeling that one important command will involve ordering a bot to do something at the location you are like. "Hold this point" or "Camp here" etc!
What would be handy would be to have custom path nodes, or similar so that you can set up your own locations or strategies with your own names. You'd go to a location and name it.
Then you could say "Hold Balcony" and they'd know what you meant. problems with it that i can think of is how it could determine how large the area is or how it's meant to do its job properly there.
Another feature that'd be usefull would be to be able to teach the bots strategies or so. Slect "train" or similar and go through some motions of a path you want to teach your bots and, possibly even how many bots should be involved in such a procedure then it'll lay the nodes for you and save it so that they'll remember it. you can save the order under a voice command then just say. "Lower bridge skirmish" or similar and all your bots will perform pre determined roles that are saved into that order. if the bots have different skills then make it so the roles of each bot is determined other wise it will have any nearby bot take the relevant role.

The only reason i'd like this is so that you could set up properly organised attacks upon the enemy. Though it doesn't sound a bit like football formation management. :S

either way manually naming locations in a simple, on a whim kinda way would be usefull i believe.

I know the next battlefield game is meant to have some pretty good bot Ai involving 3dimensional pathing and such, to hunt down the players that used to hide out of their scope.

UT very much has a feeeling of several loners wearing the same colour attacking a few other loners in a different colour. rather than one team vs another. If that makes sense?

 

[Dark Pulse]

I have a feeling that one important command will involve ordering a bot to do something at the location you are like. "Hold this point" or "Camp here" etc!
What would be handy would be to have custom path nodes, or similar so that you can set up your own locations or strategies with your own names. You'd go to a location and name it.
Then you could say "Hold Balcony" and they'd know what you meant. problems with it that i can think of is how it could determine how large the area is or how it's meant to do its job properly there.
Another feature that'd be usefull would be to be able to teach the bots strategies or so. Slect "train" or similar and go through some motions of a path you want to teach your bots and, possibly even how many bots should be involved in such a procedure then it'll lay the nodes for you and save it so that they'll remember it. you can save the order under a voice command then just say. "Lower bridge skirmish" or similar and all your bots will perform pre determined roles that are saved into that order. if the bots have different skills then make it so the roles of each bot is determined other wise it will have any nearby bot take the relevant role.

The only reason i'd like this is so that you could set up properly organised attacks upon the enemy. Though it doesn't sound a bit like football formation management. :S

either way manually naming locations in a simple, on a whim kinda way would be usefull i believe.

I believe a mutator for UT2003/UT2004 did something similar? XMaps I think?

 

[The_Head]

^^ Quoted for added effect?

A training mode would be really cool. Bit like teaching your character new moves on Virtua Fighter 4.

 

[Dark Pulse]

^^ Quoted for added effect?

No, my reply magically vanished somehow...

 

[carmatic]

xmaps? whoa i never knew about something like this for how good it sounds... programmable bots that you can play with just like you can play with Aibos ? sounds almost too good to be to me....

 

[JaFO]

ok, ive been thinking about something like this too... like, yes , imagine that you have a sniping position in the map, and its like the top of the base towers in ons-dria......

UT2kx already has nodes/scripts for this type of thing.
AFAIK it even allows mappers to set 'zones' for them to target while sniping.
And afaik they're not locked to the precise location of the node either.
The only thing that could be changed IMHO is to make the process of adding these 'special' nodes a lot more visual/designer-friendly.
Instead of typing zone-names the editor should have 'wizard'-like add-ons that would show the entire process of this kind of thing. That way mappers would automagically learn about the kind of stuff that the AI needs.

The real problem is that most mappers ignore these kind of tweaks as they consider bot-support to be a pure off-line feature that can be ignored because UT is a multiplayer-game.

As a result I think that 'easier' node-pathing routines will result in worse botpathing instead as the kind of people that would use these 'quick' fixes are unlikely to check the results.

... and the editor can run a 'virtual bot' through there thousands of times , each with a tiny variation of movement, and it picks out the most suitable paths and shapes the botpath-surface further...

the only problem is that there's millions of possible variatons as a result of the locations of a bots' opponents and its status, so there's no way the program could even begin to calculate all possible routes. You could leave the program running for days and still see 'new' routes appear.

how does seperate bot-files for each level sound? like , for example in a server that runs bots , the players movements can be tracked , recorded, and fed into the botpathing AI , and new pathnodes and triggers are formed as the bots follow where the players have been and what they have done to get there, and what they have done once they got there... or does this sound like an idea which some company tried a looong time ago and it didnt work and they gave up on it and nobody heard of it ever since

IIRC the 'first' bots for Quake required people to do just this sort of thing.
ie : run the game as a player and 'record' the nodes.

...
UT very much has a feeeling of several loners wearing the same colour attacking a few other loners in a different colour. rather than one team vs another. If that makes sense?

You're making perfect sense. In fact it is pretty obvious if you look at how the bots operate. They only attack in numbers because the team-AI tells a few bots to go to a certain location. Even en route it's obvious as the bots tend to run in column-formation (sometimes pretty 'gay') despite the fact that it is not exactly smart ...

However it wouldn't be fair to say that this behaviour isn't quite as obvious in UT2kx as it was in UT99. It still is present however ...

 

[Kantham]

No, my reply magically vanished somehow...

Lmao

 

[carmatic]

the only problem is that there's millions of possible variatons as a result of the locations of a bots' opponents and its status, so there's no way the program could even begin to calculate all possible routes. You could leave the program running for days and still see 'new' routes appear.

im thinking, maybe there can be constraints on the variations of situations that should be simulated in creating a botpath like this... these constraints would be unnoticable, like only the geometry of level counts , etc etc so theres much less to worry about ... but if your virtual bot runs into 'funky' situations where they just go in loops, you might as well crash your editor when that happens...

 

[JaFO]

How would you define such a constraint if you can't even possibly know what the author of the level has in his mind ?
Perhaps he wants to use that a certain set of polygons as cover and not as a ladder of sorts or vice versa.

 

[azcn2503]

How about liek... un-pathed AI? Maybe with a few little bits added in to the map to say "jump here otherwise fall to your doom". There was a CS bot that did this, and it was very bad. UT could make it good.

 

[edhe]

If it was bad how could something else make it good?

Without a pathing system the AI would have to be very very advanced, and power consuming. No there has to be a pathing system applied to the AI.

 

[JaFO]

Let's suppose Epic can build this 'great' AI that doesn't need pathnode-networks.
The AI would be learning each and every map from ground zero, which would make it act like 'ordinary' humans at first. However most humans get to know the map after playing it a few minutes at least. As a result the AI would pretty much be incompetent the first few minutes of the game, which would make the game far too easy.

To mimic this feature and to stop the AI from acting like newbies every damn time the AI would have to 'remember' the layout of the map in some form.
In fact it would be creating its own pathnode-networks ...

So why shouldn't mappers have the opportunity to give the AI a headstart and give them a decent node-network to begin with ?
Hence the need for something as simplistic as possible, which is the node-network we've currently got. The only real 'change'/improvement could be some kind of 'learning AI' that would start to remember tricks used by other players (be they AI or human). IMHO this 'learning'-skill should be part of a bot's "personality" as this would allow you to have bots that were slow & fast just like not every human player learns every trick in a given map.

Heck ... if it were up to me I'd let them develop 'favourite' maps as well, so bots could start shouting 'vote CTF-FaceClassic' as well