AI awareness of missing allies

[MirceaKitsune]

TDM has a complex and amazing AI: Guards can do all sorts of things like noticing when something was stolen, detecting broken arrows on the ground, permanently remembering encounters with an enemy (the player), and much more. But there seems to be just one obvious thing, which the AI is completely unable to take into account right now: Allies who go missing.

 

Suppose two guards patrol a corridor. They always walk in opposite directions and meet each other in the center each turn. The player later kills or incapacitates one of the guards, then hides the body in a room. Currently, the remaining guard never questions where the other guard has gone after a while. Expected behavior would be to become somewhat alarmed.

 

My suggested implementation is this: There should be a way to define how often two or more AI's should expect to see each other. Each AI has a value for every other AI, indicating how many seconds have passed since they were last seen; As time goes by, the value slowly increases... but whenever the given AI is spotted, it is reset back to 0. If the value is allowed to reach a certain amount, like say 300 seconds (5 minutes), the AI should stop and mumble something like "where did that other guy who was with me go?". The guard should additionally get an alert level each time... starting with just stopping and looking around, and later drawing their weapon and searching for an intruder. If the missing ally is seen after some time, the AI should say something like "where did you disappear, I was worried about you".

 

I assume this would be a bit of work, and will also require new voices. So even if it won't happen tomorrow, I wanted to put the idea up in case someone would like to take a look at it eventually.

[VanishedOne]

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/17271-guards-noticing-missing-patrols/

[nbohr1more]

wrong thread

[Sotha]

Talked before. Can already be scripted by the mapper. Seamless automatic implementation difficult and error prone. Does not add much to the game. Increases difficulty in a game, which is already quite challenging.

[MirceaKitsune]

Sorry, didn't notice that thread... I'm generally bad with searches so I don't look often. But yeah, I can see both the "challenging to implement" and "more difficulty part". The only problem for me is that the absence of this ability is too visible, since any intelligent person would ask themselves why an ally suddenly disappears without a trace. Maybe a simpler idea can be found to fix this... such as only adding spoken sentences but no alert level by default.

 

Here's an additional hint: Instead of having the mapper define how often two AI's should expect to see each other, the game could determine this automatically, as follows: The first time an AI sees another friendly AI in the world, it creates a new timer as well as an expectation value... the expectation value is dynamically adjusted as the two AI's keep seeing each other and learn their positions, and ideally solidified during the first few minutes of the mission. Or alternatively, they could be computer based on the patrol route determined by the path entities... likely a better option as it doesn't require learning during the game, and will still work if the player takes out one of the guards near the beginning.

Edited October 2, 2015 by MirceaKitsune

[rich_is_bored]

That's a lot of fluff for little benefit. It would be much easier to simply delay the reaction to spotting a body. Continue your patrol for a minute or two, make a remark about someone missing. Return to the scene of the crime and "find" them.

[Destined]

I also think, missing patrols are quite difficult to make and are also not that obvious for a guard (might take a piss, is chatting with someone else, is just slacking off in any way). But I do agree, that missing guard posts should be noted, but IIRC this is possible with a similar mechanism as the "notice stolen item" and was discussed in the other thread. The main problem here being the missing audio files for noticing a missing person. The existing ones are too obviously meant for missing items. I am not sure if there are more general ones like "There is something amiss" or a simple "Hm, strange". These could be used as a substitute for the time being.

[V-Man339]

This is something I'd like to see, and it would make assassination missions where the most I have to worry about is blood being washed away far, far more interesting.

 

I would suggest it be a less severe version of seeing blood on the ground, where the AI pauses for a bit and asks themselves what might've happened, but I don't advise a full cautionary state based on absence of blood, body or guard, as it feels a tad overkill and would make the blood aspect a fair bit meaningless.