Old Good STALKER Evolution mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl

11 comments by KamikaZzeRu on Apr 9th, 2012

Good news everyone! :) At least I've finish it - almost half-year long work of creating a full-functional combat AI. It's been a hard, but VERY interesting work. I never before created something with such complexity, so this is been for me almost an exam in game AI development. It's still have some minor flaws I'm working on, but it's already highly playable and pretty deadly. This video above are made from materials, recorded by mod's testers during last week. You can see in it how my scripting combat AI are working. This AI scheme is autonomous and fully replaces the frankly stupid original game's engine's combat mechanisms. The basic idea of scheme was to make NPC more interesting and challenging opponents, eliminating actor's total supremacy over them.

Features and capabilities of the scheme:

1. Target selector - each NPC has its own list of targets, and chooses from it the most threatening.
2. The control of aiming - NPC targeting enemy with mind, picking up an aiming point regardless of the distance to the enemy and position of his body.
3. Control of fire - the higher the rank of the NPC - the more adequately he uses a weapon, such as not trying to fire bursts from self-loading shotguns
4. Combat maneuvers - NPC strafe in battle, scamper from one shelter to another, try to circumvent the enemy from the flanks and go behind his back.
5. The use of shelters - NPC dynamically choose where to hide from enemy fire, and trying not to be substituted under fire.
6. Teamwork - the scheme is constructed so that the behavior of some NPC complements the others. For example, in combat with multiple opponents a couple of them can overwhelm you with suppression fire, not allowing to pop out of shelter, while others will crawl from the flanks.
7. Compatible with standard game logic - the scheme takes into account the standard logical constructions - combat ignore, camper scheme, the scheme of a fanatic.

Most of AI scheme functions are changing it's work according to NPC rank and community, so you get much more resistance from army spec-ops than from newbies, but even newbies are deadly now if you using only your spinal cord in combat, instead of brains. :)

Also in this video you can see how our work on locations are progressing - almost every location now have 3D-panoramas around, so locations aren't looks like they are floating in the middle of gray "nowhere", which greatly adds points to game's atmosphere. Also many building on locations got back their window glasses, light sources, and location terrain got their details which are being cut in game's release for unknown reason, leaving huge gaps in games AI-node network.

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P.S. Guys, who mailed me, especially Kyle, and written questions in comments and threads - please sorry for long time not replying. I've been exceptionally busy last month both by my job and by my modding work. I'll surely answer you around few days.