Everything. but I should probably be more specific, so here goes. and please keep in mind, if I sound like an idiot, it's because I'm unfamiliar with something and haven't done enough research/found the facts I need to understand something. first, are you doing any hard coding on the game engine itself to change anything or is everything handled with scripting within the engine itself? and if you are doing hard coding, what type of stuff are you guys doing the coding on- AI? physics? object manipulation? Second, I'm really interested in first how the AI interacts with the environment and the player. some of the stuff I've read here- such as the frequency of thoughts for an AI actor decreasing the further away from the player it gets- seems quite interesting. other things seem like a hassle, such as getting the AI to interract with doors or to realize that a moving box held in front of the player is not actually supposed to be doing that. I'll go off on this first. I've been trying to figure out how to make AI work effectively. it seems like the same idea as a bounding box can be applied to a lot of things- not necessarily a box, though. An example I can give is a system for hearing sounds that I've worked out: a bounding sphere/circle/dome/etc can be used both for the 'ear' and the source of the noise. obviously, any NPC's inside the bounding sphere of the noise can hear it, and some NPC's with acute hearing (such as dogs) can hear things further away so they have their own sphere to increase their chances of hearing something. also, unlike graphics, sounds can take a second or two longer to be processed, so you don't have to waste a lot of processer power on them when you need it for the graphics. it seems like the developers who worked on the third splinter cell game realized this, although I've got nothing but my own observation to base this on. The second thing that I've been itching to figure out is the "something suspicious is going on" AI. one concrete example I can give from TDM is the hiding behind a crate you're carrying and the AI not recognizing you because you're behind a crate. Please bear with me as I haven't had the chance to play the TDM yet. I have yet to see, in any of the demo videos, an AI actor doing the "hmm, something's not right" dance. once again, I point to bounding boxes, or more accurately, a bounding ray: it seems like the same hard coding that is used in lighting could be used for the detection by an NPC in the game. simply trace a ray from X point (somewhere around their eyes) for Y distance (everything past that is cut off/ignored) and then check for visiblity within that, and then within that visible area- then you do a check of something like switch (something fishy?): case |nothing is moving| {normal}: case |something is moving| {something fishy}: case |I know you're there!| {attack mode}: ok, thats about it for now. it's almost 3 AM and I've gotta hit the sack. thanks in advance for any input! edit: speeling
