Monsters affected by weather

[paxx]

I don?t want to sound too condescending, but at the moment you don?t make creatures this way.

You first figure what level of difficulty you want them at. And to add in flavor you add the random ability to do the things mentioned is weather is storming. And then you give them some of their characteristics. If it has electrical power, it will try to maintain range and shoot, if forced into melee it will use a damage shield on it?s self, the damage shield overrides if it has opponents both in melee and at range. And then you can say low- to mid range creature.

Also a question of balance comes in, if the creature is a low end creature, yet when it has it?s powers it can take on high end characters, we have problems. Creatures should only be able to tip the balance in their favor over their normal hunters, not clear them out.


If you leave it as you do in a paper and pencil game then you loose all concepts of them acting on their own as needed, so you really need to give their style and methods into an on or off setting. What triggers what and what does not.

While it sounds less then creative, well the flavor comes in giving slight variables and covering up the obvious. The more on and off switches you have the more organic the AI seems to be. But if you have too many then the creatures may not act in a semi predictable fashion, or any number of other things, so it is a balance. The true art of Game AI is that the AI acts exactly like the programmer intends and is predictable by him/her, yet the player can never quite get a handle on how it will act, he can make an educated guess, but every battle is a bit different.  


This is meant to be constructive criticism; your above example is very much what this allows us to do, with weather and or environmental variables affecting creature stats.

[Vengeance]

The true art of Game AI is that the AI acts exactly like the programmer intends and is predictable by him/her, yet the player can never quite get a handle on how it will act, he can make an educated guess, but every battle is a bit different.

I sort of disagree with this.  The art of game AI is to make mobs which fight in ways which are not obviously stupid and not always the same, but which result in mobs that are still possible to kill and still possible to affect through players\' good use of tactics.

- If mobs simply acted randomly, every fight would be different but there would be no sense to it and it would rapidly get boring.

- On the other hand, if they were the perfect fighters and were not surmountable that would also not be fun.  For example, if a mob is untauntable and he goes after your mage with the low HP, your mage is going to die every time.  Making a mob respond to taunts maybe isn\'t the way to make a really smart mob, but it is a way to give other players the opportunity to save their mage.

We can never forget that making unkillable mobs is easy.  Mobs in reality are there to be obstacles and rollercoaster rides for the players--cannon-fodder, not proof of how 1337 the AI programmers are.

- Just my opinion,

Venge

[Xalthar]

I agree with you vengeance.. I\'ve played a lot of mmorpg\'s and they have all (sooner or later) made it, so that the mobs would react to taunts, and not go for the weakest HP char.. And that\'s a good way to save the gameplay for mage type chars, since playing a mage is hard and teaming up with others is always great

[paxx]

Vengeance
I am not clear in how does anything that you stated contradict what I have stated in this?

I think you are assuming vast variations in how the monster acts each time, I did not mean it in that way. I meant that you don?t want it so that (eq example) you pull the orc from tent 2 you know that the orcs in tent 1 and 3 won?t come over to beat on you. The AI should leave a bit more chance then that.

Creatures have character traits, they do X a lot more often then Y, and they never do Z.
They will also have weaknesses and foolish things that they almost always do, like their main caster may be really good at heals, but he will only heal at the end of combat, or when noone is attacking him, and his friends won?t defend him.

In this case a well rounded group of monsters or MOBs are actually less then the sum of their parts, players learn to have one player attack the healer and then they no longer must worry about him healing.

I never stated anything about making the ultimate challenge to the players.

I am almost positive that we agree on this, but I could be wrong.

In how the programmer intends the AI to be is where we seem to have a difference, I am assuming he wants the creatures to be beatable, but if that is not the intent, well that is his prerogative. In many single player games, part of the puzzle of a certain part is that you can not defeat something in combat, so you must do something else. In persistent worlds this is more complex and not as desirable, as it is more annoying to die 20 times then it is to reload a saved game 20 times, until you learn your lesson.

But tell me if we still have a difference here :-)

(this is a great example of the dev team in discussion mode, arguing over something we are not sure we agree on and having to explain the point to verify if we actually disagree or not)