AI revisited

[sinewav]

Either that or unfathomable amounts of skill.

Oh man, I knew what you were linking to before I even clicked it. That's awesome. I remember after I read that I decided to try it myself, and did the same thing in about 10 minutes. It was pretty hard.

[Phytotron]

This may or may not qualify as a bug, but it's definitely a bad thing, in my view. When setting the AI to be independent (i.e., each on its own team), apparently [SP_]AI_IQ gets ignored. Rather, judging by the bot names, it automatically begins with the top one ("Armagetron") and works its way backwards depending on how many bots there are.

(Come to think of it, I haven't checked, but this may occur anytime there's more than one team of AI, regardless of how many are on each team.)

Obviously, this is undesirable as it makes customising the AI impossible, and as I noted earlier in this thread, the high-IQ AI's are anything but. They mostly just sit in one spot tracing themselves, going in and out, and ultimately offing themselves. They're utterly pointless. (I've found that an IQ of 78 is about as high as one can go without having them behave like this, especially if there's any adjust/180-grind prevention.)

[sinewav]

Of course, ideally, then new Ai would be able to "learn" Tron from playing, just like in that one research project: http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/tron/html/about.html

[Phytotron]

Yeah, but first I want that "bug" fixed.


(To what sinewav said, I wonder if checking out the "adaptive AI" in Madden 10 might be instructive. I haven't tried it, just referencing it.)

[Z-Man]

It's not a bug. Those AIs that join non-AI-teams are supposed to be support players for humans and thus follow different rules. Yeah, support for zero humans is still support for a human team I'll probably do something about it when we re-integrate the new AI, it's likely it won't have an automatically assigned IQ anyway, rendering the current assignment system moot.

Regarding the AI behaviour, they can't be good at all setting configurations. Give them negative wall acceleration and they'll still grind for speed.

[Phytotron]

Regarding the AI behaviour, they can't be good at all setting configurations. Give them negative wall acceleration and they'll still grind for speed.

Right, but regardless of settings, why should the higher-IQ ones do nothing but sit in one spot and trace themselves around, in and out, until they explode themselves?


Here's another thing that I'm quite sure fits into the "not a bug" category, but is still a little annoying for online SP purposes. I set SP_AI_IQ to, say, 50 (whatever) and SP_AUTO_IQ to 1. I enter the server and drive it either up or down. Now I leave, someone else enters, and the IQ will remain whatever I left it off as. Or, someone comes in, we play, I leave, they're back in SP mode; same thing, obviously. This makes some sense for local games, but not online when you have a bunch of different single players and would like it to reset for each player. It might be nice if that could change, to make online single-player a little more worthwhile and rewarding for players.

In the meantime, is there any current workaround (besides an external script or some hacky shit like that—and, obviously, server reset) to get the SP_AI_IQ to reset to default between single player games? Everytime.cfg is loaded each round, right? So that won't work. Hrm?