[COOP] Fix for Bots shooting trough foliage.

[Valmont]

Devs, may I ask if the Ai shooting trough smoke fix that blessed us some months ago will be able to make it into the foliage and trees in regular maps sometime in the future?

That would help tremendously in reducing the permanent "suppression" from bots specially on dense forests and Vietnam maps and would help a great deal in COOP, not having to reduce the bot's shooting distance just to have fair matches.

I know that previously it was stated by the devs that they would look into the possibility if it wasn't too resource intensive then they would implement it the same way it works with smoke but more permanently.

Here are videos of the tech in action, pretty amazing if you ask me!

[Michael Z Freeman]

The AI blocking smoke grenade is in PR now ?! LOL, I did not even know about this and I was advocating to bring this into PR and FH . The bottom video is mine.

There's also a way to simulate suppression of bots by enemy fire.

If I remember correctly, with foliage, the fix is basically the same as with the AI vision blocking smoke grenade. However there are a lot of vegetation models. But I think the change could be made by altering each map with a script or just with a python script that alters the models at run time, although it might be too resource intensive to do it every time the map loads..

[Valmont]

Originally Posted by Michael Z Freeman

The AI blocking smoke grenade is in PR now ?! LOL, I did not even know about this and I was advocating to bring this into PR and FH . The bottom video is mine.

There's also a way to simulate suppression of bots by enemy fire.

If I remember correctly, with foliage, the fix is basically the same as with the AI vision blocking smoke grenade. However there are a lot of vegetation models. But I think the change could be made by altering each map with a script or just with a python script that alters the models at run time, although it might be too resource intensive to do it every time the map loads..

In a optimistic scenario PR's COOP support would be much improved by adding the following:
1- Bots don't shoot trough foliage. (Hopefully the script/Map Modification can be done)
2- Bots can be suppressed just like human players can. (Albeit differently but still!)
3- A % of bots will stay on its furthest taken flag in defensive positions rather than all of them pushing the next flag.
4- Bots will follow their squad leader (human) orders rather than the "high command Ai".

We already have the "tech" for points 1 (Partially implemented by Arab to the smoke grenades).

And Point 2 conceptualized and demonstrated by Michael Z.

Point 3 seems to already be a thing on some COOP servers out there so perhaps it could be done for all COOP maps.

Point 4: That already happens sometimes... Sometimes as a squad leader my bot subordinates do exactly what I order them to do... other times they just do what the "high command Ai" tells them to do. Would be awesome if when when a Human is on a bot squad as a squad leader then their regular Ai strategic command is disabled in favor of player orders. (Just for that squad of course).

Now it is a matter of some of our cool devs like [R-CON]?Fastjack and [R-CON]?Arab to take this to fruition I guess.

Lets pray for it =)

[[R-CON]​Fastjack]

1. The foliage thingy:

The only way we know is to add col.meshes to it. When we do this, the server had to calculate many collisions.
I dont know what happens to the performance.

But i know, you will curse and damn the Devs for implemented and yourself for recommending it in following situations:

1. Your handgrenades bouncing back because of hitting leaf or a flower in the poppyfield.
2. Bots walking in forests and have good cover (umbrella shield) and your mortars or 40mm Mk19's have little effect.
3. Firing AT missile and hitting leaf of a bush and killing friendlies or maybe yourself.
4. Vehicle battles in a mixed open/forest area - vehicles or human players would hide into bushes and use it as armor against handheld weapons.
5. ->[INSERT HERE OTHER PROJECTILE COLLISION ACCIDENTS OR EXPLOITS]<-

2. The suppressing thingy:

That's the newest way to keep bots away from straight running into heavy weapon fire from vehicles or few handheld weapons like GL's, machine guns etc.
If you play coop with other humans, firing into the foliage can also supress the bots and they start dodging and stop firing. If you want you can call it areal counter fire.

3. Can be done in scripting aidefaultstrategies or mapstrategies.


4. Tbh. i only looking for human vs. bots improvements and not for AI/SAI and human interactions. That is to SP'ish. You can play the commander and the bots following your orders.

If you have still idling bots and they requesting new orders but always ignoring new orders the agression factor in the strategies could causing it.

[[R-DEV]​Arab]

Originally Posted by Michael Z Freeman

The AI blocking smoke grenade is in PR now ?! LOL, I did not even know about this and I was advocating to bring this into PR and FH . The bottom video is mine.

There's also a way to simulate suppression of bots by enemy fire.

If I remember correctly, with foliage, the fix is basically the same as with the AI vision blocking smoke grenade. However there are a lot of vegetation models. But I think the change could be made by altering each map with a script or just with a python script that alters the models at run time, although it might be too resource intensive to do it every time the map loads..

Yep, bot fire suppression has been added for a while now for v1.6 It will work with LMG's and AT rockets only.

The smoke grenade collision mesh doesn't work when fired from vehicles yet. Tried getting it to work with mortars back then but bots still can see through the smoke, though that doesn't mean it doesn't work just means the way it's setup for vehicles needs to be changed, and more experimentation done.
This hasn't been solved as of yet in the BF2 Modding community, same with bot fire suppression not working against vehicle guns.

[Valmont]

First, thank you both Fastjack and Arab for your honest responses!

Originally Posted by Fastjack

1. The foliage thingy:

The only way we know is to add col.meshes to it. When we do this, the server had to calculate many collisions.
I dont know what happens to the performance.

But i know, you will curse and damn the Devs for implemented and yourself for recommending it in following situations:

1. Your handgrenades bouncing back because of hitting leaf or a flower in the poppyfield.
2. Bots walking in forests and have good cover (umbrella shield) and your mortars or 40mm Mk19's have little effect.
3. Firing AT missile and hitting leaf of a bush and killing friendlies or maybe yourself.
4. Vehicle battles in a mixed open/forest area - vehicles or human players would hide into bushes and use it as armor against handheld weapons.
5. ->[INSERT HERE OTHER PROJECTILE COLLISION ACCIDENTS OR EXPLOITS]<-

2. The suppressing thingy:

That's the newest way to keep bots away from straight running into heavy weapon fire from vehicles or few handheld weapons like GL's, machine guns etc.
If you play coop with other humans, firing into the foliage can also supress the bots and they start dodging and stop firing. If you want you can call it areal counter fire.

3. Can be done in scripting aidefaultstrategies or mapstrategies.


4. Tbh. i only looking for human vs. bots improvements and not for AI/SAI and human interactions. That is to SP'ish. You can play the commander and the bots following your orders.

If you have still idling bots and they requesting new orders but always ignoring new orders the agression factor in the strategies could causing it.

1) I didn't know that the smoke grenade bots fix created a solid invisible object that had all those drawbacks. I thought bullets, grenades and rockets would still pass though it and only made the bots not see though it (like a glass transparent window that would still allow projectile penetration but made the bots not see though it). That is too bad. Perhaps only the biggest bushes and biggest trees could still justify getting the fix but leaving the rest of the foliage alone.

2) So the suppression thingy could be added for a future PR version? Seems like a good fit for high caliber suppressing weapons!

3) Do you thing we can get a few maps/layers with these improved/scripted aidefaultstrategies or mapstrategies? Would be awesome!

4) Imagine one human controlling a bot squad on one side and the same thing on the other, the coop game suddenly becomes a lot more dynamic and PVP like. I've had such games in PR before but as I said it was probably caused by having modded files that totally disabled the "commander high Ai" so the bots accepted all their human squad leaders commands and it was AWESOME!

[[R-CON]​Fastjack]

1) I didn't know that the smoke grenade bots fix created a solid invisible object that had all those drawbacks. I thought bullets, grenades and rockets would still pass though it and only made the bots not see though it.

Why Drawbacks?

The grenades are made to block the bots X-RAY vision and stop them from firing it.
Why it should be important that a missile can pass it or not? No bot will use any weapon on a human target in a smoke cloud because he cannot see any target.
What you all want : That bots cannot see any target but starting blind firing into smoke?

Also i meant the foliage (vegetation) collisions. There would be much more foliage collisions as smoke collisions on maps like sareema, ghosttrain, lashkar, kokan etc.


The only drawbacks will caused by humans and not by bots but that alreayd happens since years on Deployment Server and everyone saying it's a legit tactic to use smoke on his vehicle.

[Rabbit]

Or just add maps that remove the crazy amount of bushes.

[[R-CON]​Fastjack]

Exactly, not the tree's are the enemy - they are in the bushes

[Valmont]

Originally Posted by Fastjack

Why Drawbacks?

Yeah, I meant these drawbacks for the foliage implementation:

Originally Posted by Fastjack

1. The foliage thingy:
But i know, you will curse and damn the Devs for implemented and yourself for recommending it in following situations:

1. Your handgrenades bouncing back because of hitting leaf or a flower in the poppyfield.
2. Bots walking in forests and have good cover (umbrella shield) and your mortars or 40mm Mk19's have little effect.
3. Firing AT missile and hitting leaf of a bush and killing friendlies or maybe yourself.
4. Vehicle battles in a mixed open/forest area - vehicles or human players would hide into bushes and use it as armor against handheld weapons.
5. ->[INSERT HERE OTHER PROJECTILE COLLISION ACCIDENTS OR EXPLOITS]<-

I just mentioned the grenade fix because it is the same technique that would be used for a hypothetical foliage fix... right?

Removing the excessive foliage and bushes on coop maps suggested by Rabbit is also not a bad idea and would have the added benefit of increased performance