Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #1903 Joined: [ 17:48 ] [ 22 Jun 2007 ] Posts: 172
Today I gave it a try...
The bots were totally dumb: In particular on the Kingpin base on Highway map! At the start of the match they would pick up cars and drive on the racing track (red) instead of taking the tunnel to battle (white).
So I wanted to take a look at how the AI paths were made, this image is tank.raw (I also have the other files for infantry and tank0level etc...)
I have used genpathmaps tool to convert the .raw files to .bmp and .raw 8 bit files, but have no idea on how to fix this
Registered Member #1903 Joined: [ 17:48 ] [ 22 Jun 2007 ]
Today I have tryed the BF debugger, the zombie map gives many errors related to invalid/missing AI files... I also found some tutorials to make the pathfinding files with ed42!
Did anyone already do this? I would like some advice
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
Do you have the unedited RAW files? I might try and look at them. Are you trying to keep the bots exclusively on the tunnel area? You will need to hand-edit the pathmaps to exclude all the areas you don't want the bots to go even if those areas are technically drivable. Also, for the level 0 pathmaps, you need the tunnel areas to have at least 2 pixels clearance for the bots to consider it an area they can drive on.
Strategic areas will also need tweaking to make this work. If you have two areas you want to be usable for bots, but want the bots to use one path to get to a certain location over the other, StrategicAreas are needed to guide them. Since normally they will take the shortest possible path to the nearest StrategicArea. Your SA's might not be setup correctly. In fact I'm pretty sure that's 90% of the issues you are having right now.
I do know that for El Alamein for example, there's extra StrategicAreas near the mountain passes that tells them to use those areas to get to the other side of the map. I would just have to figure out how to neighbor the SAs correctly so they follow the paths you wanted.
Registered Member #1903 Joined: [ 17:48 ] [ 22 Jun 2007 ]
Yes I want them to drive exclusively on the tunnel area. I have seen that there are SA's on the racetrack on highway, and they are used like waypoints to control the bots path.
What tools do you use for Pathmaps editing? ED42 or Photoshop?
I still didn't figure out how SA's work... and that's in fact the problem I am having on the zombie map (I ran the BF debugger and it showed SA's missing) because the bots are still, and I need to create Strategic Areas probably...
Also, do the SmallOnes files have something to do with Strategic Areas? After using genpathmaps I still can't figure out what colored lines or areas (from the infopath files) mean.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
I use both depending on the situation. Usually I clean up the pathmaps in photoshop (removing orphaned areas and/or fixing large areas) and use ED42 to refine the pathmaps.
As for the way points, you would need to move them to the tunnels to make them work. The Small ones usually don't need to be edited unless there's something seriously wrong with them and I don't have much experience editing them. If you edit the pathmaps, (but not the waypoints) you almost always get best results if you regenerate the info files with the debugger afterwords. (use ai.createSearchTypes to generate just the info/smallones files)