Frikbot Item desirability

[gnounc]

Doing what I said above would be a start. It would set the priority of the item on item spawn. So it would
update to your new random value every time the item spawns.

On the other side, you would want to set the items priority to zero when its picked up.
That would ensure the bots ignore the item until its respawned.
self.thisp = 0;

that will work because the map items are still there, theyre just invisible and inactive.
but THEN, you still need to find the function that reactivates them, and reset their priority (to something random again if you prefer) so when the item respawns its priority is not still at 0, and the bot knows to seek out that item again.

Thats really all there should be to it.

[gnounc]

[Lightning Hunter]

Gnounc, you are awesome. I was going to sit down today and try to figure some of this out myself, but it probably would have taken me all day, and I would have been asking for help anyway. Now I can complete some more waypoints instead. I'll be adding you to the credits for sure.

I do have some questions about this new code, however:

-First of all, I noticed that my QC compiler was complaining about "rand" being an unknown value in items.qc, so I changed it to "random". Will this hurt anything?

-Should I remove the random values in bot_ai, since they are now calculated in items.qc? After all, you gave everything a universal random value of 35, correct? Are the item priorities even used anymore in bot_ai?

[gnounc]

yeah random() is what i meant. i always do that for some reason.

Anything you put in bot_ai for randomness beforehand should be reverted, but the priority values are otherwise still used.

Let me know if it works.

[Lightning Hunter]

[gnounc]

yeah, theyre equally distributed random values, so they should be going for the same items roughly. the variance should be pretty slight. doing what you said would help. allowing a wider variation including negative would help too.

you can do that by doing a second random call and using that to set the random bonus to negative 50% of the time.

remembering to cap it at 0 of course. then your range would be from 0 to 65. The difference would be much more noticable then.

[Spike]

apparent preference for an item can also be affected by the waypoints the bot generates. if it stays within an area, chances are its because it only has waypoints for that area, and because it stays, it doesn't generate any for anywhere else.
I dunno, I'm too lazy to study the code.

[Lightning Hunter]

[gnounc]

[Lightning Hunter]

[gnounc]

no i hadnt seen the edits. Yes, the randomization should apply to ammo as well.
Also you said the bots still fight over a spawn item thats already been taken..above i mentioned in botAI checking for an item being taken and removing it from the list, I dont see you mentioning having put that code in. If items arent removed from their goal list, they will continue to try to get them.

Also you may be better served at this point by going to the irc channel.

[Lightning Hunter]

[gnounc]

thing is correct there.

thing is the argument name of the entity being passed.
if you look a bit above that it says something like thing.waypoint.

[Lightning Hunter]

After doing more testing today, I can confirm that the random priority seems to be working at the start of each match. However, the random values don't seem to be updated each time the item is respawned, because the bots go for the same items the whole match. Also, I noticed some strange behavior with the Frikbots now in which they randomly decide to deviate from their current goal, get off track, and run in to some walls. I think this happens when they decide they want a different item and attempt to go for a different waypoint/item, but don't properly calculate how to get their based on the nearest waypoint. They instead just run straight toward the item/goal/waypoint (which may be across the whole map), and get stuck on a wall.

Thanks for the help so far Gnounc, but maybe this is more trouble than it is worth? Of course, if you have some ideas of what might resolve these issues, I would love to hear them.

[gnounc]

sorry, I'm out of ideas.
I'm really not sure what else to do, except ask frikac for help.
I hope you manage to get something going though.