Gijs-Jan

So true..

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into it.

The new patch should include behavior which uses the upper levels for all races. Harridans have special behavior built in due to their unique abilities. I also labored quite a bit to reduce turn times. A typical 8 aliens, 4 civvies mission now has a turn time of 1-3 seconds for me. Mind that those numbers were reported on a pretty beefy machine.

If the value isn't in aiprops.xml then probably not, sorry.

The primary slowdown during the AI turn is displaying / running through animations. It takes up 50% to 90% of the total turn time. For missions with layouts which are hard to calculate for the pathing algorithm (large UFOs), this is around the 50% mark.

As Skitso's inbox is full: (He PM'ed me on the Harridans / upper floors & Alien Morale) Actually, I've been working full time the past week on Harridan flying & upper floor behavior. From the AI perspective it's all finished now, however it unveiled a whole host of new bugs we are currently dealing with. (Harridan hover glow animation not finishing, funky LOS bugs for lower -> upper floors, etc) Alien Morale is more the gamelogic side of things, and the current AI should pick it up once integrated. I'm not sure on whether it'll make it in before the game is released.

Thanks guys; it means a lot For the modders; almost every aspect of the AI can be adjusted to better fit behavior you want through the weights in AIProps.xml. I've primarily spent time in fixing bugs and adding in new behavior, so there is still a lot to be gained in tweaking those weights. Once the deadline of the release is over, I'll try to get some blog posts up explaining everything. (If I manage to find the time )

Thanks for the report and the save, I'll get right on it!

Excellent, thanks!

If you guys manage to get a save of the behavior then I can probably get it fixed quickly. Otherwise I have to spend my time playing the game to encounter it, as it is a bug that doesn't seem to happen often (reliably that is). And with the deadline approaching I am currently focusing my efforts on the Harridans taking flight.

Good to hear :-); Except of course the CTD!

Just to be clear, this "feature" was only to speed up movement, and should not affect gameplay in anyway. On a lighter note, I submitted a fix today so it should be fixed in the next build.

Well, that's a bug then, and I'll fix it :-) If you have a save game that showcases the behavior, that would save me quite some time.

Funnily enough, the value calculations weren't the big problem. The primary problem is the path calculation. It is the major bottleneck as the pathing system wasn't designed with heavy AI use in mind. Especially pathing to a location which was ultimately unreachable had a high cost; which the AI now has added checks for to exclude.

The AI turn times were improved by several fixed/enhancements: - Tiles which are considered unreachable are no longer taken into account during the value calculation. This solved turn times for maps which have a lot of "black areas"; bases defense, final mission. - During path calculation; the AI is now a lot more selective in which locations it may target for pathing. - A small caching layer was written around the pathing algo to ensure that if the state of the game doesn't change, it just returns the same path for a given source & target. - Some animations are skipped when we are sure the player cannot observe them.

No; not directly as the AI uses a lot of inferencing on where you are. It never used the "global LOS" for this, only the actual LOS of the squad. So, unless this got bugged in the process of implementation, there should be no consequences.

This was indeed the case; and at some point the decision was made that some aliens should stay inside the UFO at all times. Anyway, this should be fixed in the next build, along with a far more diverse number of AI settings. For the modders this will mean that the AI weights can be set per Race, per Rank, per Behavior Type.

This should be solved in the next build

WARNING: Peek behind the curtain! Ok, so to provide some insight into this: The aliens within a UFO have a slight tendency to stick to upper floors, with higher ranks having a higher tendency. (FloorPreference aiprops.xml) This should be (somewhat) negated by their incentive to search unexplored tiles for Xenonauts (ProbabilisticSearch; aiprops.xml), and even further negated when they can reach "known" targets (Squad LOS), or receive requests for backup (AI attacking Xenonauts). The behavior (sticking to upper floors) is amplified by the need to stay out of unexplored danger zones (Teleporter with no cover). So by tweaking the weight of the Probabilistic Search, we might give the AI more incentive to come downstairs (more risky behavior). Or we could give the AI knowledge about the UFO being breached, which would make it want to move downstairs, and then trigger Squad LOS / backup requests.

If an alien is surrounded by fire on all tiles, then yes it might still move through fire. However, there should be some pretty heavy "incentive" for it to "want" to move through fire.

I'll take a look at this. There should be some easy implementations that should fix the worst of it.

This should be fixed in the new release. This isn't an AI bug, so you'll probably want to post it in the ground combat thread.

Thanks for reporting it, but it was a game mechanic problem due to some debug code being pushed in. :-)

My roommate decided to print them out. Btw, Reapers shouldn't approach unless they are certain of an attack/kill. The cover/hiding behavior should be easy to implement by adjusting the pathing weights. *Edit: wrong thread*

*Wrong thread * Btw, Reapers shouldn't approach unless they are certain of an attack/kill. The cover/hiding behavior should be easy to implement by adjusting the pathing weights.