Island War is first and foremost an Artificial Intelligence system designed to create incredibly reactive and intelligent army units that are capable of planning and reacting to sophisticated situational offensive and defensive encounters, utilising anything available, all on-the-fly. In development for over 8 years, Island War is a completely new game built inside Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising. It is a Tactical Military Action Shooter aimed at providing realistic, actioned packed dynamic battles in any location, at any time, under any situation.
Complete overhaul of the built-in AI system to create smart, dynamic and highly trained units for you to fight!
UAI is a complete reconfiguration of the games built-in AI to get the absolute best from it. It covers the following main areas
Vision and Hearing
Central and Peripheral vision has been setup to mimic that of a human, giving the AI much better awareness of what is near them, and requiring "focus" to detect more distant targets. The net result is much more convincing stealth and search mechanics where Line of Sight feels realistic and fair
Object Filtering (how much the AI can see through something) has been adjusted so that they are much less accurate when firing at you through things like bushes, grass and smoke. Large thick bushes and trees will actually block Line of Sight if you stay completely behind them (hiding inside a bush does not work unfortunately, you must be behind it)
I spent a long time balancing the AI's hearing so that they react as realistically as I could get to sound.
See the stealth video for an example. They can no longer detect you immediately by sound, instead they must turn and visually ID you first. This opens up a level of stealth not possible before!
Movement Mechanics
The AI's movement speed, as well as stance choices have been adjusted so that they are able to get into cover faster and protect themselves from fire better. When the AI will search for cover has also been adjusted to help ensure they rapidly follow critical orders (like shooting armor) while still giving them freedom for more generic orders (follow, move, defend) to find cover anywhere.
Weapon Usage
Every single weapon in the game now has its own unique customised "usage" configuration for the ai. This tells the ai how quickly to fire, the size of a burst and adjustments over different ranges. Along with these configs is individual accuracy configurations per stance to ensure the AI are not too accurate/inaccurate with any particular weapon keeping things fair, but feeling realistic.
Variations in the usage configuration between variation (Assault vs Marksman vs CQB etc) finally makes units act according to their role. A marksman stays back and takes slower, better aimed shots, while a CQB gets in close and opens up!
Vehicle Usage
Each vehicle has been adjusted as best as possible to help make the AI not suck at driving. It is a shockingly flawed system and will never approach good, but at least they get stuck a little less.
Vehicle "reset" time has been reduced so you don't have to wait FOREVER for them to get unstuck.
AI are now aware and able to use all the weapon systems on a vehicle! It is really important you remember this if you are in a helicopter, as most PLA vehicles have anti-air systems!
For the soldier, balancing comes into effect to make vehicle encounters survivable. Heavy cannons (and similar super-powerful systems), while technically perfectly eligible for taking on soldiers, are only used if the vehicle is under heavy fire. The AH6-J is a perfect example of this. It will strafe you with its mini-guns, which is bad enough, but if you all start shooting at it, expect a full salvo of rockets to be coming your way in response!
Target Selection
Each weapon also has a reconfigured target selection matrix, which takes into account distance, morale, pinning, cover, ammo and a host of other situations to rank a particular weapons effectiveness against all known targets in play. The AI then use this information to decide which weapon they are carrying should be used to fire at which target.
This results in a much more complete usage of the weapons available in game. Underslung Grenade Launchers, auxiliary vehicle weapons and modes of fire are now all used by the AI across all weapons and vehicles.
Healing System
Further tweaks to the healing mechanic in an attempt to make the AI react faster (especially to the player being wounded). This is mostly successful, but a suppressed soldier will never heal unfortunately and this is what usually prevents them from saving you.
Experience
Mostly for Mission Editors (in the campaign, soldiers are "regular" and Spec Ops / SOF are "elite") each experience level has been opened up to give huge variation in how experience effects the ai.
Less experience brings faster morale loss, slower weapon aiming, and less precision. Higher experience negates some negative morale effects entirely and improves weapon usage greatly. Elite really are Elite!
For example a squad of "green" soldiers will fall back from a single well placed LMG soldier suppressing them, but just a small Echelon of Elite soldiers will continue the assault even under prolonged focused fire.
Morale and Doctrine
The entire system has been redone from the ground up to create long-term morale effects rather than the nothing-until-broken setup of the original game.
Building morale takes time, but losing it happens quickly. Just a single shot whizzing past an AI is enough to effect their morale.
Thanks to the morale sharing mechanic, the "momentum" of a battle is alot more pronounced now, with taking and dealing damage effecting the AI of all units in the combat area. This leads to moments where you can almost feel the "tide" of battle change for or against you as units start dying and their comrades react.
Doctrine controls how the AI react to a situation (They can be At Ease, Aware and Combat Ready) and previously it was configured so that each state lasted a long time before being down-graded. It turns out this was a mistake, and now that Doctrine's drop very quickly, the AI more realistically return to defensive/idle orders and movements in stealth scenarios. During combat they switch to searching much faster or back to their original order once enemies are dealt with / lost entirely.
Pathing and Object Avoidance
All the Trees and Rocks have been adjusted so that vehicles avoid forests, while troops find it much easier to get behind trees for cover (you will still see the odd idiot standing next to a tree)
Small Flat rocks which were previously ignored are now avoided which helps reduce them getting stuck (vehicles especially)
Vehicle pathing has been adjusted so that it relies more on the local object avoidance than the A* path finding (which ignores objects). This really helps vehicles avoid forests and heavily rocky areas, but its not perfect.
Reaction
AI now take being shot at ALOT more seriously, and will take cover or hit-the-dirt much faster than before. This really ups their survivability!
New damage reaction mechanics has been unlocked which include :
Knockdown - Heavy damage will cause the AI to fall over. This is not them being blown back like in the movies, but gets them falling to the ground in pain. They will get back up once the shock wears off
DeathRattle - Enough damage will cause the AI to hold down the trigger on their gun, which can lead to wild sprays as they go down (looks awesome)
Concussion - Basically knocks them unconscious for a moment so they cannot react (always paired with knockdown so they don't stand around like idiots while stunned)
For those wondering, these mods are updated versions of those included in the initial IW2017 release. Feel free to copy these over the top of your current IW2017 installation to upgrade it!
Best mod ever. Thanks. ;)
Will it work with default .exe of newest game version? I might not be able to replace it with custom .exe, but don't want to explain it now.
I remember modding for newest game version was locked for some time, have CM released something like hotfix in the past to enable modding again? I can't remember.
There was workaround (before custom .exe appeared) to configure AI directly in the mission files, but if I am correct it was limited?
Cheers.
Is this supposed to turn the AI godlike in close quarters?
I always get headshotted instantly whenever I walk into their line of sight, my squadmates also do too. They are still OK at long range, though.
I'm definitely removing this. My squad just keeps getting yeeted in mission 5. They can only rely on me killing the enemy with a scoped rifle.
That line about line of sight being more "fair" is complete bs. They will kill you in one shot if you DARE popping up anywhere near them which makes fights with lots of rendered grass next to impossible. Mission 3 is a notorious example with the dang spotters.
This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.
If you are getting random crashes from updating to Ultimate AI 2017 update try this.
I did extensive trial and error with all the files in the Ultimate AI 2017 February 21st update. I installed one at a time to see if the game would crash. I deducted that it was crashing from the ai folder. All other folders and files in the ultimate AI 2017 February 21st update did not cause a crash (or any of the other updates for that matter). I finally deducted that it was the weaponsusagevalues.xml file causing the crashes. When I used the oringinal xml file overriding the new xml file there were no crashes, but the new xml file crashes for sure.
So I took the original xml file (from Island War 2017) and edited all the values to match the new xml file (ultimate AI 2017 February 21st update)but did not add any of the new weapons. So the original file had the same weapons in it (no new ones) I just edited the numbers to match the new xml file. It crashed. So it must be an original weapons in the original xml file with the new values entered. So you could install all the updates and just replace the new weaponsusagevalues.xml with the original weaponsusagevalues.xml and the game should be very staple, it was for me at least.
I believe I have narrowed it down to the grenade weapons. Specifically, sa51m32. But I'm getting inconstant results. I took the new xml file and put the orinigial values for just the sa51m32 and tested it in game. I went through multiple battles with no crashes but twice the game crashed wile driving. So I don't know for sure.
These are my results. For whatever they are worth for a 11 year old game. :)
Just wanted to say thank you to TemplarGFX for all his work and time. Thank you so much for a great mod. So much fun! Godspeed.
Cheers Team, I've been trying to install this mod with the upgrades for a long time and its always bugged me that I couldn't use the ultimate AI upgrade. I'm gonna try this and see how it goes! Your research into the issue is greatly appreciated, and I hope that if Templar ever picks this mod back up, he'll appreciate it too :)
I have downloaded Operationflashpoint.forummotion.com.
Im guessing this one is more modern and better? :)