In some sectors, like the ones near the Team Homes(1 2 and 3) the bots should completely ignore players, unless shot AT(targeted at the time of firing), hit, or rammed. Also, it would be neat to have 'subteams' within the bots, so they could have little wars of thier own. Add depth to the game.

I've seen bots going to town on each other before. Not sure how that works, but it happens. Also, I thought there were no bots in team homes...and the ones in 4/6/12 pretty much do ignore you.

X0563511, the bots used to completely ignore you in sectors 4, 6, and 12, but they were too easy to kill. They come pretty close to ignoring you now. It works better than it did before.

The 4,6,12 bots do ignore you as long as you stay away from them. If you come closer than 500 meters (or so) a bot will attack you. Only one at a time, though, unless you attack one that isn't already coming for you.

The bots used to shoot one another, but now that they're much more maneuverable and twitchy, they can't hit one another. So it uses gobs of server CPU when there's around 50 bot battles going on and they're constantly dodging, never hitting.

Obviously I could tweak things to end these battles more quickly if we wanted to have bot squadrons attacking one another.

No! Nothing more complicated, 12 is the only sector where my framerate drops to 3.4 FPS and I drop packets to kingdom come.

The bots actually can get started on shooting at eachother in semi-random times.


a)
When you herd them, a bot at the "back" fires at you, missess and is close/hits another bot... there will be a bot-fight ensuring and you'll have to find the dead bot as it respawns

b)
They sometimes collide with eachother, somone of them takes damage upon a minor fight escalates.

Watching bots fight is quite boring, since they follow the same pattern of movement in between them, so its "up and to the side" to dodge, and then some turbotaps to circle eachother.

They dont have much knowledge about 3 dimensions.

Its more fun to make them issue into roids than to watch them fight.

sometimes, when you fly through a large collection of station defence bots, like I made in 2 once, they start attacking everything in sight, each other, enemies, and friendlies.

well, if the AI is improved to give them a kind of 'fuzzy logic', it would make them a lot smarter and skilled. of course, to make the game more playable and the server able to handle the load, less bots could be put in game.

Smaller numbers of more skilled bots may be a better alternative. The fact that they attack one another is an oversight in their scripts, which are just ad-hoc crap I whipped up to get them to work and I haven't spent very much time perfecting.

Bots have a very limited worldview in the current version. They can't even "see", really, they just inherently know their own position, orientation, weapon velocity, the enemy's position, and whether or not the direction they want to go intersects the bounding sphere of any objects (including weapons). This is why they get stuck -- the bounding sphere doesn't fit most of the objects in the game very well. They don't exactly make the most of this information, either.

In the next version they'll have roadmaps around sectors, the ability to find arbitrary paths, and the ability to "see" whether or not they can go straight from one point to another (using actual geometry, not bounding spheres). This will prevent them from getting stuck, but their combat will still be unintelligent with quick reflexes. I would like to experiment with various online learning algorithms afterwards to make that more interesting, but I may have other priorities for a while.

Allow 'em to make mistakes once in a while. Don't make 'em too perfect. You know what you should do? Do an experiment that involves all sorts of brain scanning equipment. Find the average Vendetta player and hook electrodes up to their brain to record brain waves etc. Use the brain waves as the foundation of data for your bot intelligence. That way you can program fear, risk taking, and downright stupidity into the bot code. It'll be real! Ohh wait, this sort of experimentation would probably cost a lot.

=/

Well, some of us wouldnt give much signal to the cranial electrodes :)

I am glad the AI is being worked on. Think of it: eventually there may be bots coordinating with each other to do 5-pronged attacks in 3 dimentions! Well, in sectors 16 and above maybe. That would be a little hard for newbies to take..

Today, in S10 by the S7 gate, I saw 2 bots inside an asteroid. I tried to hunt them but I couldn't find them. I was targeted and everything, but I could not get a visual so I hovered right over the roid and noticed that one of them was only 40m directly below me. Inside the roid. And there was one right next to it. It was wierd.

Um... Bots in Roids? Maybe you discovered thier secret hatchery! (they gota come from somewhere!)

lol