Tweaking Ai Bounding Boxes

[Ishtvan]

Copied from other thread:

 

I'm putting the updated sizes on CVS now. For "average" sized humans, I put a size of "24 24 68" in the tdm_ai_humanoid def, and removed the size var from their files so they would inherit it. This way we can tweak the average size in only one file until it feels right, rather than setting the same value on 5 average sized AI. For non-averaged sized ones we can always overload it. I had to keep it in for some of the taller ones like the revenant, prelate, and (for now) citywatch elite.

 

Btw I think there may be a problem with how far it extends up. That distance was intended for AI that have separately modeled heads, so it just came up to the neck. For AI without separate heads, this means the bounding box is not encompassing their head. This means that you could theoretically jump on their heads and they wouldn't notice anything wrong (physics still ultimately defers to the AF collision box, but it uses the basic collision box for tactile alert). I could be crazy but I think I remember someone reporting this bug when jumping on AI's heads? Well now we know why.

[Ishtvan]

I fixed the problem with them not being alerted when they swing their arms and hit you, so their b.box does not have to encompass their swinging arms.

 

However, I think an AI box width of 24 is still a bit too small because their shoulders poke out of this box a little (at least for the elite city watch). So if they're standing still, you can bump into their shoulders and they won't register it because it's not within their b.box. Maybe something like 29-32 might be better.

 

Another issue is that these AI bounding boxes seem to be axis-aligned, so they don't rotate when the AI rotate. This means we can't make it wider than it is long, for example, to account for the arms, because it will not rotate with them and this would lead to incorrect results.

[sophisticatedZombie]

Ishtvan,

 

When working on the player leaning, I noticed that rotating the bounding boxes is possible but can be rather complicated. It requires you to write in some code that detects movements that would have rotated the box through a collision in-between animationf frames.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, thanks. I'll know where to look if I need to do it then. I'm not sure we need to do it though, as long as the box extends out to the AI's shoulders it should be okay. I think making it something like 30 would work, 24 is just a bit too small. 48 was huge though.

[Ishtvan]

Uh oh, making the boxes smaller caused problems with pathing. I'll have to set them back to 48x48 for now and see if KO'ing works well enough with a smaller player box and maybe extended blackjack distance.