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[Breli]

That just reminded me of something: bots resp. their visibility calculation seems to ignore entities like doors, breakables and so on. So they'll try to shoot through a 500 meter thick concrete breakable wall if i am not mistaken. I never played vanilla quake and don't know whether it had the same bug or not. If not, it must be a "flaw" in the WQ code ... its quite hard to fix I guess.

[torhu]

I guess the bot behavior stems from the fact that the doors in vanilla q3 open automatically when you get close, and also when you shoot at them.

[sig11]

This thread is a partial thread from the smoking guns forum moved here. It has been noted a few times before (search the forum) and has its own bug entry :

http://www.westernquake3.net/bug_databa ... tails&id=7

but does not have an own thread.

Anyways, I've just completed a fix ...

[ReD NeCKersoN]

Anyways, I've just completed a fix ...

The WQ3 coders rule.

[Breli]

Anyways, I've just completed a fix ...

I wish there would be a way to give you a BIG virtual gug

Breli

[sig11]

Thanks guys !

Just some teaser: now the bots behave much more reosonable on wq_train.

Ah, and I forgot two questions I wanted to ask you mappers:
- Are there any doors made out of any other surface than wood or stone ? (this is what I assumed so far)
- How thick is the glass in windows ? I assumed a thickness of 1.0 (in these coordinates which stretch a few hundred to maybe a thousand in each direction).

[L3th4l]

There are metal doors too.

The thickness of the glass is dependent on the mapper.. I make my glass about 1 to 4 units thick, while red makes his 4 or more...

[Breli]

Thanks guys !
- Are there any doors made out of any other surface than wood or stone ? (this is what I assumed so far)

Is there any particular reason why you want to restrict the usage of texture classes for doors with your fix? If not, I vote for full flexibility and would like to use any class for doors ... think of curtains that may open (cloth_) or a window (glass_) ...

- How thick is the glass in windows ? I assumed a thickness of 1.0 (in these coordinates which stretch a few hundred to maybe a thousand in each direction).

Like L3th4l said: it depends ...

[torhu]

There is a way of knowing if an entity is a door, don't know if it will help you. You can also try searching for "-1000" in the game and cgame code, it's only used a few places.

Code: Select all

if (g_entities[trace.ent].s.eType == ET_MOVER && g_entities[trace.ent].s.angles2[0] == -1000)
    // it's a door

And sometimes I wonder if bots can see you through the fence on wq_fort, but maybe they just hear you?

[ReD NeCKersoN]

I try to make the thickness of my windows look natural to whatever the thickness of the wall is. Thick wall = thick glass. Thin wall = thin glass. But I don't think I'd worry about glass too much since even bots should be able to see through objects that players are able to, imho.

[sig11]

OK, some more explnations about my questions:
The trace function that's the key to the visibility calculation does not seem to distinguish between doors and windows. I tried CONTENTS_MOVER hoping to catch doors but it did not seem to work. I will have to double check if I can use torhu's logic.

So, I needed one further way to distinguish, and that's the surface (again, maybe I can use torhu's logic). I probably should assume that only glass is transparent and all the rest is opaque.

However, the trace stops at the first encounter, and so I need to step from door to window to door to window etc. in case there are several along the line of sight (which does happen quite a bit). And so the code needs to know how far the trace needs to advance, hence the thickness (maybe with some effort the code can find out the thickness by itself). So far I tested a lot in wq_tillian and wq_lake and a bit in wq_highnoon2 and wq_train, I will test some of Red's maps more extensively to catch some thick windows.

[Breli]

Ok. I get where you are coming from. As I said: not limiting our options concerning textures classes on doors would be great. I don't know much about how visibility calculations are actually handled by the code during run-time. If I get you right, the engine runs a trace in every direction and tests whether it can "find/see/touch" a player. It'll break off if the surface is too thick.

Can't we add additional key-value pairs in order to make it easier to identify doors/translucent surfaces? Can you check for these easily during engine run-time?

Running all these additional traces will put quite a bit of strain on the servers, I guess. If we can make things easier during map building time, we might consider that option.

[sig11]

If I get you right, the engine runs a trace in every direction and tests whether it can "find/see/touch" a player. It'll break off if the surface is too thick.

Almost. It only traces to each entity (player or other bot) and checks if it can see it. So it's not that much anyways - after all, the game does not need to find all the entities ... only each bot.

Can't we add additional key-value pairs in order to make it easier to identify doors/translucent surfaces? Can you check for these easily during engine run-time?

Theoretically, yes. I've briefly tested if I can use existing ones. But the game has to be able to deal with [/i]all[i] current maps. And it's much less work to do it in the game code than to change all maps

Running all these additional traces will put quite a bit of strain on the servers, I guess. If we can make things easier during map building time, we might consider that option.

When I started, I was concerned about that, too. But the game does not trace that much to begin with. And as I said, only to all players. And even I with my slow system did not notice any FPS drop. So, don't worry.

In general: I've tersted and changed (and fixed ) a few things. It turns out the thickness is irrelevant ... so forget that part. But I'll make the surface detection more general. An update should be done, soon.

Oh, and @torhu: the bots cannot see through the fence in wq_fort. I just double checked that. At least the visibility function does not trigger. They may hear you, though. There is such a "hearing" function, but I did not check that one.

[DeUgli]

How about bots seeing and shooting through brick walls? I observed that in No Name City, when a bot's rifle barrel came through a second-storey brick wall and the bot shot me. Unfortunately, I wasn't fast enough to get a screenshot.

[Breli]

That'll be the bank resp. the place in NoNameCity where the safe is, I guess. The whole wall is a breakable and, thus, bots can see through it since entities are currently ignored. AFAIK, sig11's fix will not be able to solve that ... we will have to create a property/key value pair for entities that explicitly tells the engine how to treat that respective surface ...