grayman

Once I get out of WS5's beta test and release it, I'll start looking at the visibility issue in detail for 2.08. Until then, I welcome all test maps folks want to contribute, plus videos they have time to post. I'll add these to my already existing test maps and see if I can come up with an improvement that doesn't cause agita for existing missions.

The AI will never see you as an enemy "immediately". There will always be a short period of reaction time entering combat state where the AI pauses to assess what he's seeing. I think I expressed this back in the day as what to expect if you jumped down right in front of an AI. His reaction is going to be "Huh? What the hell is this? Hey! I found him, brothers!! To me!!". That thought process is going to take a bit of time.

We do a lot of testing of each new TDM release, and we depend on feedback from the folks doing the testing. If no one complains about a particular issue, then that issue remains "hidden" until such time that someone does complain. In this case, since it took 6 years for someone to notice something was off is sort of a testament to how robust the code is, and the fact that most players tend to avoid fully-lit situations stretched out the discovery time. That's not to say that covering the fully-lit situation is unimportant, but given the triage nature of bug fixing, we prioritize the problems that bring lots of complaints, and pass on the ones that are noticed only occasionally until we have time to address them. AI behavior when the player is fully lit apparently is not something that bothered people enough to cause a flood of complaints in this area.

Let me know when you start beta and I'll look at what's going on.

3 - It's a bug if the area is black and the AI is spotting a body deposited there. You can have AI not spot bodies by setting chanceNoticePerson to 0, but that's not recommended, because they won't see anybody. The scene needs to be examined to find out where the light is coming from enabling passing AI to see the body.

2 - Remove the "wait" spawnarg from the path_sit. What you want is path_corner->path_sit->path_wait->path_anim->path_wait->path_corner. Adjust the wait times on the path_waits as needed.

1 - You have one or more horses in your map. Each of them is embedded inside either worldspawn or monsterclip at dmap time. What you need to do is move each horse so its origin is at least 50 units from nearby worldspawn or monsterclip.

It's not so much the door handling as it is the searching. If the guard turns away from you, and you're not in his FOV, he isn't going to register you during those frames. So it's going to take a bit longer to continue ramping up. I think there's an expectation that if the player is fully-lit and close by, that the AI will easily spot you and climb quickly to alert index 5 (combat) regardless of how good his vision is. Perhaps that's a factor that should be added to the current calculations. (??) That change, however, might work to the detriment of the player in less-than-fully-lit situations, which means some maps will play differently than they have for the past 6 years.

CutN looks fine. Not sure what's going on with the Bakery Job door. I see an example of an AI getting confused, which happens now and then. And distance is always part of the equation.

Without making any code changes (i.e. NOT fixing the "bug"), I played with the vision factors to obtain the 1-2-4-8s suggestion (time it takes for the AI to draw his weapon and start moving toward you). So that I don't have to make a multitude of movies for different situations (I try to avoid making movies), you can make these changes to your Darkmod.cfg file to see the results, and test them in whatever situation doesn't seem right to you in 2.07. (i.e. fully lit in CutN, AI far away) seta tdm_ai_vision_hardcore "0.544"seta tdm_ai_vision_challenging "0.272"seta tdm_ai_vision_forgiving "0.136"seta tdm_ai_vision_nearly_blind "0.068" To get back to the 2.07 settings, just delete these lines from your Darkmod.cfg and run the game. The 2.07 settings will be restored.

@Springheel: Your take on these numeric/naming suggestions?

The player is seen as an enemy at level 5, but only if he's closer than 787 units (20m). (In CutN, the "too alert" guard and the player are ~980u apart.) It might be easy enough to have the AI look toward the player during level 2 (suspicious), but when he reaches level 3, he's going to start to search, and he's going to need to look where he's going. As for the "complicated" suggestion: AI don't know where they are until they get there, so they won't be able to gauge "exited POV" until they've done it, which would require that they turn around and retrace their steps to regain POV. I'm not sure I want to wrap my head around the complexity of that code, since pathfinding is going to pull them each frame back onto their patrol route. I have an idea how it could be done, but I don't have the time atm to implement that much new code.

Okay, I'm not getting enough responses to my questions, so let me rephrase: For the given situation in Cleaning Up the Neighborhood (fully lit, far away), how long (if at all) do you think it should take for the AI to start walking toward you before he recognizes you as an enemy? In both 2.00 and 2.07, the walking starts at 2.73s for Nearly Blind. Nearly Blind Forgiving Challenging Hardcore

Another question: Given the four levels of visibility, do you have different suggestions based on each level? Nearly Blind Forgiving Challenging Hardcore

I found the "bug", which was introduced (by me) in 2.04. The change fixed a problem first noticed in 2.04 development where a distant AI would be frozen in place if the player was too far away to "recognize as an enemy". (Think of whether you'd recognize somebody as a thief at a far distance.) The change allowed the AI to at least search around for whatever was tickling his alert level. I suspect that search changes I did between 2.00 and 2.07 would also have solved the "frozen" problem, so I'm experimenting with removing the distance check. Please comment on what behavior you'd expect from an AI who's far away and has spotted you in full light, raising his alert level, but not to the point where he's sure you're an enemy. Would you rely on his search pattern to bring him closer, or would you want him to delay a bit, then come straight for you?

So I found a bit of space to gather some numbers. Here's a pic of what I measured. The granularity of the snapshots is 0.1s, not every frame, so these are rough times: This shows the amount of seconds it takes from the guard first spotting you, for him to reach each of the 5 alert levels. Comparing each visibility setting in both 2.00 (back when I wrote this stuff) and 2.07 (today). What pops out for me is that the delay between reaching level 4 and level 5 has dropped considerably. This delay was intended to give the player some time to duck back into the shadows. What I'll do when I get more time is examine the delay code and try to figure out where the bug crept in.

Okay. I should be able to take this up in a couple weeks. Atm, I'm trying to stay focused on getting my WIP through beta test. Sorry for the delay, since the numbers are important, but it can't be helped.

"more lenient" means slowing down the reaction time, which needs to be done in the code, so I'm not sure why you're asking for suggestions, as if there are alternatives. Also keep in mind that this discussion is continuing w/o anyone having looked at the visibility code, to see if there is a bug. IIRC, there were changes to the lightgem made in the past year or so that might be returning a different light value to that code. This needs to be researched. I don't think we should be discussing changes until we have all the information. If someone thinks a change can be done through spawnargs or cvars, and we make that change and subsequently discover the root cause and fix that, the spawnarg/cvar route will need to be undone.

Perhaps, this being a stealth game, the solution is not to stay in full light for more than a split second.

I should point out that the sword is drawn when the guard enters alert level 4. At that point, he hasnt yet decided that youre an enemy. Its enough, though, to draw him to you, and when he gets close enough, he makes up his mind and goes to alert level 5 (combat). I can imagine that even at the nearly blind setting, you being in full light will get his attention. It just takes a bit longer to arrive at level 5, but in full light, the difference between good eyesight and bad eyesight might just be a fraction of a second. Which is all speculation, of course, without any measurements to back it up. In time.

This is the first report of an issue in this area since I fixed it all 6.5 years ago. Since it's been that stable, no changes have been made. So if there's a problem now it was introduced by the math/lightgem/lighting/whatever changes made in 2.07. (my guess) It'll be a few weeks before I can look at this problem.

Thanks for the warning.

Yoweeeeee!!!!!!!

I switched WS5 to Version 2, and the presets appear to work just fine.

That's the coat_of_arms4 skin.