Any AI scripter around ?

[The Happy Friar]

yeah, that's what I mean by dodging. In SS:BR if you use miniguns, AI would get hit and then dodge. However with projectiles, AI will dodge (I don't recall if it always dodges).

That must be why I always used miniguns.    They AI must of had a time limit between dodges or else they would of never been hit.

[oneofthe8devilz]

The state of Doom 3 modding is pretty sad (while people still play and buy Doom 3, there aren't any new mods coming out and many of the old mods are abandoned).

So I am wondering if there are any modders who dwell on this forum worked with Doom 3 AI.

The question is if AI seen in my previous game, Steel Storm (http://store.steampowered.com/app/96200/), doable in Doom 3 without messing with C++ code.

@motorsep

The way I see it is that you basically have 3 options here...

Either start seriously learning and understanding the Doom3 engine, game and script code, focusing on that task for the coming months/years until you reach the desired level of technical fidelity to implement all your desired features yourself...

...or...

Start saving up money until you have a big enough financial investment sum to hire talented people that will quickly adapt and understand the Doom3 codebase, implementing your desired features for you...

...or...

Giving up your project due to the current lack of resources and/or technical abilities...

Expecting from a forum that barely has 84 members after the d3w meltdown to fix/explain all technical obstacles that you might encounter during the work on your own project is pushing it beyond the capacities of what this forum can provide or what it may have been intended for...

In a way it fascinates me, how over all those years that I have had the "privilege" to observe your online behavior, you've remained absolutely resistant in learning how to adapt and properly behave in online conversations, especially in a cases like this one here where it is you basically asking for help while at same time you trying to piss everyone one off as hard as you can with your cocky and ignorant statements...

[motorsep]

@devil: I think you are very off-topic here, but ...

99% talented programmers somehow despise idTech 4 and don't want to touch it with a long stick (several ex-ID software folks already suggested ditching the engine). Money have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with this. They won't do it even for money (they would be more happy charging me less if I go with Unity or UE4).

I already foresee shit storm of fanboyism coming, so please do that in another thread.

[oneofthe8devilz]

I disagree...

I wonder how hard and how many potential candidates you have interviewed and how many of them were qualified for the job at all...

A professional programmer gives a shit about which engine is currently trendy...

He will work for you because to him it is a contract and because he has the required skills to complete it...

Most professional programmers I have worked with in the past years are mainly interested in problem solving... They usually absolutely do not care about which engine renders the most beautiful scenery or with which one it is the easiest to generate content/gameplay...

Also I really question the financial offers you have made your potential candidates and am pretty sure that if you would be serious about your project and put 15K on the table for a month of intense and productive programming, no qualified programmer in his right mind would turn you down... If so he would've been the wrong candidate to begin with...

[motorsep]

That's fine. Obviously when I step up and disagree with certain things, because I have some knowledge too, I am cocky and I have no online manners and so on and so forth. But you, and some other folks can freely do so, right?

You can disagree in your own thread, this thread is about AI in id Tech 4. Thank you.

P.S. I have professional programmers on my team, who obviously work day jobs too. 1 month of intense work requires full work day commitment and only a person who does that for a living will take on such assignment. And such person won't agree to $15k per month. They would agree for more like $100+k per year. Cos you know, they have bills to pay and families to feed. So steady paycheck is appreciated. 1 month is absolutely not enough when dealing with unknown engine. Most of that time a programmer, a professional programmer, will learn the engine first, and maybe by the end of the month he would begin producing something fruitful.

[BielBdeLuna]

I think you have to forget about animations and focus on flying monsters.

[motorsep]

I think you have to forget about animations and focus on flying monsters.

I figured I can play with fly_* defs to stabilize entity (so it wouldn't wobble like Cacodemon). I got test model/anims/def setup. Now I need to make rough scratch AI code to even test the model in-game :/

[BielBdeLuna]

you can use testmodel

[motorsep]

I actually saw the model when I was setting up AF for it. I totally don't understand AF related stuff. For example, model disappears before it's completely out of the view, because "body" AF-body (on the origin bone) is out of the view. So imagine I have an octopus, and the head contains one AF-body (on origin bone), but tentacles have other AF-bodies, as soon as the head's AF-body is out of the view - whole model will disappear. Any ideas about that?

[BielBdeLuna]

yeah, the only solution that it comes to mind is radical, we should scrap the AF program and do it in Blender with full control of all as an extension of the exporter, stuff like this will come once I finish the damn python API for idTech X

[motorsep]

yeah, the only solution that it comes to mind is radical, we should scrap the AF program and do it in Blender with full control of all as an extension of the exporter, stuff like this will come once I finish the damn python API for idTech X

It really has nothing to do with AF Editor. It's just we need to understand the setup and its limitations. I used AF Editor and Notepad ++ to set up my AF rig. It works for the most part, but the thing is that there are certain way for setting up constraints and bodies, masking content, and including/excluding bones. Maybe certain combination is broken or not support or unfinished. I am using setups Doom 3 never used, but it's available.

[BielBdeLuna]

your setup you described is somewhat like the four claws crane that the player uses to clear off a room full of toxic waste barrels isn't it? the middle part of the octopus should have it's proper collision shell and then every tentacle could have a nocliping shell with some system c++ controlled for it's moving isn't it?

we might have to fight the existing programs unknown quirks or do our own program with our known quirks
the more we work with the engine the more useful will be creating our own tools because it will give use more knowledge on the system I guess.

[motorsep]

your setup you described is somewhat like the four claws crane that the player uses to clear off a room full of toxic waste barrels isn't it? the middle part of the octopus should have it's proper collision shell and then every tentacle could have a nocliping shell with some system c++ controlled for it's moving isn't it?

we might have to fight the existing programs unknown quirks or do our own program with our known quirks
the more we work with the engine the more useful will be creating our own tools because it will give use more knowledge on the system I guess.

Didn't think of that example, but regular characters would work the same - limbs are like sort of tentacles.

It just dawned on me that I might be missing a bone at one extremity and that's why bbox is constrained to "body" only. Will check after work.

It's really easier to figure engine out than build own tools. We added a few minor improvements to the tools already, except the Radiant if virtually untouched. DarkRadiant is quite sweet, but it seems like development has been bumpy lately and almost dead. If you have a burning desire to have a better level editor, there is TrenchBroom 2.x https://github.com/kduske/TrenchBroom/tree/develop and the author made it in such a way that you could potentially plug in any idtech game into it. Just need to write extension. So I talked to him and he is open to adding Doom 3 support (but as always the case with such projects, he won't do it himself :/ )

I'd like to use Blender, but Blender can't do cubical lights, and whole a lot of other things :/ I talked to some folks from Blender Foundation and they said certain things that Radiant does are not possible due to limitations of Blender's API.

[BielBdeLuna]

what can't be done in Blender? the cubicle lights could be replaced with blender lights at export time, there is many ways to replicate the way d3 does the lights, but what else, the nurb curbes? the way the texture is setup since brush creation? all those things can be generated via scripts

if you do the tools you get the knowledge of how it works (and if you are smart enough you distribute that knowledge) and with knowledge then you can expand on the original tools on your own environment adding new features.