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Quick Wins for enhancing Monster AI

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Perdurabo

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Aug 4, 2009, 11:23:55 AM8/4/09
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Monster behaviour in Kharne is currently pretty dumb. I'm not talking
about (the not-implemented) special attacks and behaviour for each
creature, but rather they will currently stand and fight even though
the player is butchering them.

I've been thinking about this and I think I can achieve a 'quick win'
which will enchance AI considerably.

Put simply:

Allow certain monsters to flee away from the player if they are
sufficiently injured (yeah, yeah, I can hear you say, this is pretty
standard. But wait...). If there are other monsters visible that
belong to the same basic type, then flee towards them (i.e. safety in
numbers). Else flee directly away from the player. If a fleeing
monster cannot move away from the player, then it turns and fights.
(again, pretty standard).

Now, there is some additional subtlety I intend to code. If there is a
Unique Monster within line of sight, injured monsters don't flee but
instead shout something along the lines of "We will die for you,
Wibbly the Doomy!"

Perhaps the opposite effect could also occur - when a Unique dies, all
sentient monsters within view flee with a "Seeing its Champion dead,
the wibbly runs away". Obviously this would not be a permanent
fleeing, but of time-limited duration.

Perhaps even if there is a current monster fleeing, other monsters of
the same basic type will move towards it as a higher priority than
even moving towards the player, to simulate them covering it whilst it
retreats.

Thoughts?

Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?

Auric__

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Aug 4, 2009, 12:11:56 PM8/4/09
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On Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:23:55 GMT, Perdurabo wrote:

> Monster behaviour in Kharne is currently pretty dumb. I'm not talking
> about (the not-implemented) special attacks and behaviour for each
> creature, but rather they will currently stand and fight even though
> the player is butchering them.
>
> I've been thinking about this and I think I can achieve a 'quick win'
> which will enchance AI considerably.
>
> Put simply:
>
> Allow certain monsters to flee away from the player if they are
> sufficiently injured (yeah, yeah, I can hear you say, this is pretty
> standard. But wait...). If there are other monsters visible that
> belong to the same basic type, then flee towards them (i.e. safety in
> numbers). Else flee directly away from the player. If a fleeing
> monster cannot move away from the player, then it turns and fights.
> (again, pretty standard).
>
> Now, there is some additional subtlety I intend to code. If there is a
> Unique Monster within line of sight, injured monsters don't flee but
> instead shout something along the lines of "We will die for you,
> Wibbly the Doomy!"

That sounds entertaining.

> Perhaps the opposite effect could also occur - when a Unique dies, all
> sentient monsters within view flee with a "Seeing its Champion dead,
> the wibbly runs away". Obviously this would not be a permanent
> fleeing, but of time-limited duration.

How about, rather than a time limit, instead have them flee until they
can't see the player any more, than instantly forget about it?

> Perhaps even if there is a current monster fleeing, other monsters of
> the same basic type will move towards it as a higher priority than
> even moving towards the player, to simulate them covering it whilst it
> retreats.

More entertainment. ;)

> Thoughts?

Moo.

> Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?

No, but I'd like to see these in action.

--
You always know the right thing to say, because it's
usually the opposite of what comes out of your mouth.

justin hoffman

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Aug 4, 2009, 1:26:38 PM8/4/09
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I'm sure you have already seen the state based AI article over at
roguebasin. But in it is mentioned how angband handles a simple state
with retreat and such.

Basically, each enemy has a morale which determines how likely they
are to flee given their hit points. Then there is a random chance
they have of fleeing. While fleeing, there is then a random chance
that they become berserk and re-enter the fray. They then are much
less likely to flee.

I don't really know if people would even notice either way.

One thing I am doing, is having the AI try to get out of my line of
sight. So they are more likely to turn a corner than to run straight
away. I tag every tile with a scent using my LoS algo, fleeing
enemies try and get as far away from my stink as possible. It makes
them very sneaky, funny watching the AI try to pillar dance you.

Pender

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Aug 4, 2009, 2:33:42 PM8/4/09
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On Aug 4, 11:23 am, Perdurabo <perdurab...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Monster behaviour in Kharne is currently pretty dumb. I'm not talking
> about (the not-implemented) special attacks and behaviour for each
> creature, but rather they will currently stand and fight even though
> the player is butchering them.

Personally I don't see what's wrong with that behavior. Players don't
really expect monsters to be psychologically sound actors, I think. If
roguelikes were movies, they'd be cheesy 1980's ninja movies, not
dramas -- I say it's enough that monsters attack until slaughtered.

But if you want to impart that degree of realism/smartness, why would
you time the fleeing behavior? Shouldn't monsters flee until they are
healed, or possibly forever? And they probably shouldn't wait until
they are low on HP; if the player takes half of their life with his
first hit, they can probably infer immediately that the rest of the
fight isn't going to go well for them either. Similarly, if one kobold
sees you slaughter another kobold with a single hit, it doesn't take a
terminal degree in koboldology for them to accurately assess their own
odds of survival.

Then there's the part about being cornered. I'd hope that a smart
monster would run for the door, not back itself into a corner. In my
game, fleeing works like the wandering algorithm -- monsters pick a
random door of the room they're in and run towards it; then, when they
pass through it, they pick another door from that room with a heavy
bias for not picking the door they just came through. To turn this
behavior into fleeing, two changes are necessary. First, if they can
see the player, they'll add up the player's distance to each available
door, and they'll add up their own distance to each available door,
and they'll pick between the doors to which they have the greatest
proximity advantage over the player. Second, if they enter a dead end
room and the player is not in sight, they'll cower in the center of
the room. If the player at any point moves adjacent to them, they'll
resume fleeing -- which makes it look like they're trying to dodge
around the player and back into the hallway.

If you want an even smarter monster, I suppose it should look for
loops in the level -- be they pillars or long circuitous routes -- and
dance forever around them. I haven't done that because I think it
would be frustrating and not at all fun, and as some have noted, if
you really want to optimize for monster intelligence at the expense of
fun, all monsters should grab all the available food items and flee
ever deeper into the dungeon on first sighting the player, alerting
all the monsters they meet on the way. Four levels later, the second
monster the starving player sees will be the leader of the horde of
ancient multi-hued dragons that they sent up to greet him.

Pender

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Aug 4, 2009, 2:34:58 PM8/4/09
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On Aug 4, 1:26 pm, justin hoffman <jhffmn.mya...@gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing I am doing, is having the AI try to get out of my line of
> sight.   So they are more likely to turn a corner than to run straight
> away.  I tag every tile with a scent using my LoS algo, fleeing
> enemies try and get as far away from my stink as possible.  It makes
> them very sneaky, funny watching the AI try to pillar dance you.

Interesting. I'd have thought such a method would have them get stuck
in some local minimum, i.e. back themselves into the nearest corner.
How do you get them to seek out pillars?

Darren Grey

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Aug 4, 2009, 3:17:31 PM8/4/09
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On Aug 4, 11:23 am, Perdurabo <perdurab...@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Thoughts?
>
> Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?

Whilst your ideas are nice I'm not really sure what they add to
gameplay. Felling the leader can cause others to run, but that could
be more of a nuisance for characters that can kill the leader easily.
Chasing down enemies isn't terribly fun, and players shouldn't feel
like they're punished for doing what seems like the right thing.
Perhaps put more thought into what fleeing monsters can do other,
other than just keep running till the player eventually hunts them
down.

On the subject of AI I saw some discussion on a forum recently about
the AI in Gruesome, which I found quite amusing since Gruesome has no
AI, just random movement. And yet players were convinced that the
enemies got tougher as you went further and that they'd deliberately
try to stay in each others light areas. Just goes to show how random
generation can approximate real design... So add plenty of randomness
to the AI - it'll make players think there's all sorts of complex code
going on.

--
Darren Grey

justin hoffman

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Aug 4, 2009, 4:12:04 PM8/4/09
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Well, they don't seek out pillars but they do move to a spot not in
your FoV. So say you have a situation like this.


#........
#a.......
#..#.....
#..#@...
#..#......
#..#......
#.........
#.........

Now the 'a' will move behind the pillar, and hide behind it or
whatever in the above picture.
#........
#@.......
#..#.....
#..#....
#..#......
#a#......
#.........
#.........

Now the 'a' would try to get around the corner again =p. It's not
perfect, but everything scurries out of sight.

justin hoffman

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Aug 4, 2009, 4:23:30 PM8/4/09
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> Now the 'a' would try to get around the corner again =p. It's not
>perfect, but everything scurries out of sight.

Correction, they would in this situation move to a random space of
distance, with 50% chance of moving to the right and then around the
corner again. And they can run into corners, but once out of sight
the do the random wander. It makes it more likely for them to move
around a corner as opposed to just moving away though.

I'm not using the scent method where sent travels on it's own, it's
just tagged by LoS.

Ray

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Aug 4, 2009, 6:57:34 PM8/4/09
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justin hoffman wrote:

> I'm sure you have already seen the state based AI article over at
> roguebasin. But in it is mentioned how angband handles a simple state
> with retreat and such.
>
> Basically, each enemy has a morale which determines how likely they
> are to flee given their hit points. Then there is a random chance
> they have of fleeing. While fleeing, there is then a random chance
> that they become berserk and re-enter the fray. They then are much
> less likely to flee.


That was accurate, or nearly so, when the article was written, but
current versions of Angband, and most (all?) variants, have more
complex AI.

Bear

Ray

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Aug 4, 2009, 7:19:53 PM8/4/09
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Pender wrote:


> If you want an even smarter monster, I suppose it should look for
> loops in the level -- be they pillars or long circuitous routes -- and
> dance forever around them. I haven't done that because I think it
> would be frustrating and not at all fun,

<clip>

It is frustrating iff the player has no way to deal with it. Introduce
any means for the player to evolve a tactic to cope with it, and when
they finally figure it out and kill off the "annoying" monster they'll
get a huge rush of gratification and say "this game RAWKS!"

Ways to deal with it include but are not limited to:

* trainable pets that can "wait here" or "guard this" can be left
for a creature on its next round around the cycle. Also applies
to monsters if they can be mind-controlled.

* Spells with long delayed effects, remote triggers, or triggered
by a monster stepping into a space, which you can cast and then
chase a monster into. These can "hit" a monster on its next
trip around.

* The ability to set traps.

* Indirect attacks (arrows that pass through walls or shoot around
corners for example) combined with either a constrained situation
in which the player can guess where the monster is, or some form
of detection so the player can see where the monster is.

* Large area effect attacks that permeate around corners, like poison
gas.

Bear

Kusigrosz

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Aug 4, 2009, 8:45:08 PM8/4/09
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On 2009-08-04, Perdurabo <perdu...@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?

Not sure if that is a quick tip, but I have been experimenting with
pack AI. A monster that belongs to a pack each turn counts other
members that are near (currently - in sight, sound and smell are
planned). A weighted average of the current and remembered count is
then computed, and that average becomes the remembered count, so that
a friend disappearing behind a tree is not immediately forgotten.
The remembered count is used to determine the relative strength of
the pack and the player - so, for example, two wolves won't usually
attack the player, but three will. When a pack member is killed, the
remembered count of those who can see it is decreased immediately.

Monsters that belong to one pack have also their wandering behaviour
depend in the same way on the game clock, so if they become separated
they tend to meet again.

--
Kusi...@AUtorun.itvk.pl To send mail, remove 'AU' from the address
You see here a scroll labeled "Q-e0fHUoKD8"

Paul Donnelly

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Aug 4, 2009, 10:27:57 PM8/4/09
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Darren Grey <darrenj...@gmail.com> writes:

> On Aug 4, 11:23 am, Perdurabo <perdurab...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?
>
> Whilst your ideas are nice I'm not really sure what they add to
> gameplay. Felling the leader can cause others to run, but that could
> be more of a nuisance for characters that can kill the leader easily.
> Chasing down enemies isn't terribly fun, and players shouldn't feel
> like they're punished for doing what seems like the right thing.
> Perhaps put more thought into what fleeing monsters can do other,
> other than just keep running till the player eventually hunts them
> down.

Or balance the game so that the player doesn't need to hunt them
down. For example, fleeing monsters could drop their most valuable item
when they run, and XP could be awarded for driving monsters off as well
as killing them. You could even award no XP for killing a fleeing
monster, which is pretty unsportsmanlike when you think about it.

Paul Donnelly

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Aug 4, 2009, 10:34:53 PM8/4/09
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Perdurabo <perdu...@googlemail.com> writes:

> Now, there is some additional subtlety I intend to code. If there is a
> Unique Monster within line of sight, injured monsters don't flee but
> instead shout something along the lines of "We will die for you,
> Wibbly the Doomy!"
>
> Perhaps the opposite effect could also occur - when a Unique dies, all
> sentient monsters within view flee with a "Seeing its Champion dead,
> the wibbly runs away". Obviously this would not be a permanent
> fleeing, but of time-limited duration.
>
> Perhaps even if there is a current monster fleeing, other monsters of
> the same basic type will move towards it as a higher priority than
> even moving towards the player, to simulate them covering it whilst it
> retreats.

I think stuff like this is most important. Monsters don't really need to
be smart if they can act smarter than they are. Stuff like this that
belies their thought processes will give way more bang for your buck
than actual brains. Even if it makes them *less* effective in combat,
you can just add more monsters to compensate, and it will seem as if
you've coded some kind of tactical genius. ;)

Billy Bissette

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Aug 4, 2009, 11:41:44 PM8/4/09
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Pender <pende...@gmail.com> wrote in news:f454f8ef-0d44-4d31-b4f2-
42c4f5...@b14g2000yqd.googlegroups.com:

> Then there's the part about being cornered. I'd hope that a smart
> monster would run for the door, not back itself into a corner.

There is a difference between full panic escape and a strategic
retreat. With the former, you get a bit disconnected from your
intelligence.

Most Roguelikes that actively seek to implement "fleeing" are
probably going with the "panic" version. A critter is about to
die, it panics, it stops attacking, it stops thinking, and focuses
each turn on short term escape (and thus probably quickly finds
itself in a corner if it was in a room.)

Mind, in reality, someone/thing backed into a corner can still at
least attempt to make a break past someone as they approach. A
skilled opponent can keep them trapped, but they have one more
option beyond going catatonic or performing a last ditch panicked
attack. Roguelikes don't really allow for the ability to get out
of a corner.

And mind that in reality even panicked people don't run straight
for a corner, though they can be herded into such a location. Well,
not unless they have lost most rational thought, in which case
they might go straight for a dark corner to huddle. (You could take
an approach where creatures are more scared next to what they
fear, so a frightened kobold next to the adventurer moves away
randomly, but if the kobold is a space or two away he can take a
more rational escape path.)

Xecutor

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Aug 5, 2009, 3:53:52 AM8/5/09
to
> Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?

I'd rather focus on monsters that ambush player,
instead of retreating monsters.
If player have means of dealing distant damage,
than fleeing monster is just a few saved hit points
of player.

I've implemented simple cheat-like behaviour of monsters:
When monster dies, some random monster
in relatively big radius is notified about
player's location, and is moving there.
Adds some additional challenge.

Jakub Debski

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Aug 5, 2009, 8:26:59 AM8/5/09
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Perdurabo formulated on wtorek :

> Any other quick tips on enhancing monster AI?

I recommend to read:
http://aigamedev.com/open/reviews/halo-ai/

regards,
Jakub


David Damerell

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Aug 5, 2009, 8:50:19 AM8/5/09
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Quoting Perdurabo <perdu...@googlemail.com>:
>Allow certain monsters to flee away from the player if they are
>sufficiently injured (yeah, yeah, I can hear you say, this is pretty
>standard.

It can be pretty annoying, as you try and whack-a-mole every lousy goblin
on the level.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?
Yesterday was Wednesday, July.
Today is Thursday, July.
Tomorrow will be Friday, July.

Pender

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Aug 5, 2009, 11:59:35 AM8/5/09
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On Aug 4, 7:19 pm, Ray <b...@sonic.net> wrote:
> Pender wrote:
> > If you want an even smarter monster, I suppose it should look for
> > loops in the level -- be they pillars or long circuitous routes -- and
> > dance forever around them. I haven't done that because I think it
> > would be frustrating and not at all fun,
>
> It is frustrating iff the player has no way to deal with it.  Introduce
> any means for the player to evolve a tactic to cope with it, and when
> they finally figure it out and kill off the "annoying" monster they'll
> get a huge rush of gratification and say "this game RAWKS!"

This is a fair point, but I don't think anyone would appreciate a game
that required that level of exertion every time the player wanted to
kill a monster instead of letting it flee, or even more than maybe
once per hour or two.

Gelatinous Mutant Coconut

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Aug 5, 2009, 1:54:13 PM8/5/09
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On Aug 5, 8:50 am, David Damerell <damer...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
wrote:

> Quoting  Perdurabo  <perdurab...@googlemail.com>:
>
> >Allow certain monsters to flee away from the player if they are
> >sufficiently injured (yeah, yeah, I can hear you say, this is pretty
> >standard.
>
> It can be pretty annoying, as you try and whack-a-mole every lousy goblin
> on the level.

How about this: Whenever a monster decides to flee or surrender (not
just step back or engage in a temporary retreat, but either leave the
level, settle down as a neutral monster, or join the player as an
ally), the player gets the full experience that they would have gotten
from killing them. At this point, killing the monster won't get the
player any more experience; the player can still choose to hunt them
down and kill them for their stuff, though.

There should probably be some rules to make things more interesting:

-Fodder monsters carrying interesting items tend to be braver, making
it more likely that the player will kill the monster and see the item.
-Monsters only flee or surrender if they are near death, or witness a
stronger monster flee, surrender or be killed.
-Killing sentient monsters that have surrendered or are fleeing is a
Chaotic act. (Hunting animals is okay unless your god objects.)
--Some exceptions: it wouldn't be unreasonable for champions of
certain holy orders to give no quarter to demons, undead and other
other innately unholy creatures.
-You may demand defeated monsters surrender their items and gold. If
they refuse, killing them is only a non-Lawful action, not a Chaotic
action.
--With the exception of dangerous items like weapons; it is perfectly
Lawful to kill former opponents that refused to be disarmed.
---Some monsters that would have surrendered peacefully will take
offense at this request and start fighting again. (Warrior minions
hate being deprived of their weapons.)

David Damerell

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Aug 5, 2009, 9:33:55 PM8/5/09
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Quoting Gelatinous Mutant Coconut <GelatinousM...@gmail.com>:
>On Aug 5, 8:50am, David Damerell <damer...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

>wrote:
>>Quoting Perdurabo <perdurab...@googlemail.com>:
>>>Allow certain monsters to flee away from the player if they are
>>>sufficiently injured (yeah, yeah, I can hear you say, this is pretty
>>>standard.
>>It can be pretty annoying, as you try and whack-a-mole every lousy goblin
>>on the level.
>How about this: Whenever a monster decides to flee or surrender (not
[...]

>ally), the player gets the full experience that they would have gotten
>from killing them.

Pointless. Once you've chewed through a few, how do you tell the
already-defeated goblins from the rest?

Also, a monster that is no challenge by itself can still be a lethal
adversary when you meet it when running away from a serious threat. The
incentive to hunt down those goblins still isn't really there.

It might work in a game like AliensRL where your objective is to travel
quickly and leave the level - but in that situation the effect is more or
less just to give the monster less health.

>-Killing sentient monsters that have surrendered or are fleeing is a
>Chaotic act. (Hunting animals is okay unless your god objects.)
>--Some exceptions: it wouldn't be unreasonable for champions of
>certain holy orders to give no quarter to demons, undead and other
>other innately unholy creatures.
>-You may demand defeated monsters surrender their items and gold. If
>they refuse, killing them is only a non-Lawful action, not a Chaotic
>action.
>--With the exception of dangerous items like weapons; it is perfectly
>Lawful to kill former opponents that refused to be disarmed.
>---Some monsters that would have surrendered peacefully will take
>offense at this request and start fighting again. (Warrior minions
>hate being deprived of their weapons.)

A whole decision tree for every windshield kill?

I really can't see that being a good idea. Now every time I defeat one of
those lousy goblins, I have to ask them to surrender, ask them to
surrender weapons, remember the rule if they want to keep sidearms...


--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

Yesterday was Thursday, July.
Today is Friday, July.
Tomorrow will be Saturday, July - a weekend.

Elig

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Aug 5, 2009, 11:23:43 PM8/5/09
to

I assume you've already seen the fantastic articles at Roguebasin. My
favorite is this one: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Variety_in_NPC_behavior
. Anyway, I like to keep AI pretty simple. Usually just run in, attack
the player, and optionally run (which is usually annoying).

For fleeing, a nice algorithm is to always flee towards the tile that
the monster can see which is the furthest distance from the player.
Just add or subtract 1 to X or Y trying to reach this location, and
update the FOV each tile to see if we can now see a spot which is even
further away from the player than the last time we checked. Add some
occasional random movement and it keeps them out of corners and makes
them flee through doors.

If the monster does run, it probably shouldn't run twice. That just
gets old. There's only so much you can do with monsters, really. They
can move, or do some kind of action. The player will notice: the moves/
actions it takes before combat, during combat, and after combat (If
the monster runs away/dies). Not too much for the player to observe.

Anyway, a nice trick that makes monsters seem half way intelligent is
to keep the monsters a certain distance away from the player if the
player is already engaged with a certain number of monsters. This is
nice for the player too, so he doesn't get swarmed by a random
extremely large group of monsters. Plus, this makes it look like the
monsters are waiting for the player to get done fighting before
attacking. There can also be a very small random chance that even
though this limit exists, the monster decides to attack anyway. Just
can't make the chance too high, or the player will never notice the
feature :)

Billy Bissette

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Aug 6, 2009, 12:41:30 AM8/6/09
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Elig <elig...@gmail.com> wrote in
news:6c9d319e-39a4-48b8...@m3g2000pri.googlegroups.com:

> For fleeing, a nice algorithm is to always flee towards the tile that
> the monster can see which is the furthest distance from the player.
> Just add or subtract 1 to X or Y trying to reach this location, and
> update the FOV each tile to see if we can now see a spot which is even
> further away from the player than the last time we checked. Add some
> occasional random movement and it keeps them out of corners and makes
> them flee through doors.

How would you prioritize doors and deprioritize corners? If a monster
is near a room's wall, it might not be able to "see" that an opening or
doorway only a couple of spaces away would give it a clean escape,
rather than running towards a visible corner that is further away.

I guess the easiest would be to cheat a little bit by giving a bonus
to spaces that have invisible (to the monster) adjacent spaces? Or to
just give a bonus to every legitimate room entrance and maybe to path
splits as well? Not sure how to weight away from corners though.

> If the monster does run, it probably shouldn't run twice. That just
> gets old. There's only so much you can do with monsters, really. They
> can move, or do some kind of action. The player will notice: the
> moves/ actions it takes before combat, during combat, and after combat
> (If the monster runs away/dies). Not too much for the player to
> observe.

One problem with monsters fleeing is that, outside of recovering from
a fear spell, most would have little reason to actually return to a
fight. If you are going to have fleeing at all, then it is rather iffy
to have something flee at near death, only to come back into battle
five turns later with the only difference being a couple of HP
regenerated. Heck, if it is going to flee in the first place, then it
is questionable for it to return even if it had time to recover all its
HP (unless perhaps it felt it was healing much faster than the player.)
After all, it got smacked down the first time. Why should it expect
round 2 to be a big reversal?

(Exceptions for things like some kind of morale recovery systems,
like running into a group of non-panicked allies or perhaps a
friendly unique. Or noticing that the player is near death or
whatever else. Or maybe landing a solid hit when backed into a corner
and forced to fight.)

Gelatinous Mutant Coconut

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Aug 6, 2009, 7:07:21 PM8/6/09
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On Aug 5, 9:33 pm, David Damerell <damer...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
wrote:

> Pointless. Once you've chewed through a few, how do you tell the
> already-defeated goblins from the rest?

Good point. Probably what I would end up doing would be to somehow
graphically distinguish monsters that have given up (maybe turn their
tile's background yellow?).

> A whole decision tree for every windshield kill?
>
> I really can't see that being a good idea. Now every time I defeat one of
> those lousy goblins, I have to ask them to surrender, ask them to
> surrender weapons, remember the rule if they want to keep sidearms...

Absolutely right, it would get annoying. Probably it would be best to
have surrender occur automatically, be visually obvious at a glance,
and have monsters drop whatever they are willing as appeasement right
off.

Numeron

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Aug 6, 2009, 9:58:54 PM8/6/09
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On Aug 7, 8:07 am, Gelatinous Mutant Coconut

Whats more annoying IMO is a non-town level with non-hostiles on it.
If Im in a dungeon fighting things I dont want to have to tip toe
around surrendered enemies, even if they do provide tactical
usefulness as moving pillars you dance around or (depending on game)
swap places with. Usually while traversing cleared levels they are
more trouble than they're worth, so I prefer a game without neutral/
friendlies or at least very light use.

-Numeron

Darren Grey

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Aug 7, 2009, 2:32:17 AM8/7/09
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On Aug 6, 7:07 pm, Gelatinous Mutant Coconut

<GelatinousMutantCoco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 5, 9:33 pm, David Damerell <damer...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
> wrote:
>
> > Pointless. Once you've chewed through a few, how do you tell the
> > already-defeated goblins from the rest?
>
> Good point. Probably what I would end up doing would be to somehow
> graphically distinguish monsters that have given up (maybe turn their
> tile's background yellow?).

Or just have them disappear. "The goblin drops his things in fright
and runs away. [+23 xp]" If the creature serves no further purpose
and scaring them into submission is otherwise equal to killing them...
well, may as well make it the same.

--
Darren Grey

David Damerell

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Aug 7, 2009, 10:32:25 AM8/7/09
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Quoting Numeron <irunsofastine...@hotmail.com>:
>Whats more annoying IMO is a non-town level with non-hostiles on it.
>If Im in a dungeon fighting things I dont want to have to tip toe
>around surrendered enemies,

Why tip-toe? Most games don't attack peacefuls by default.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> Kill the tomato!
Yesterday was Friday, July.
Today is Saturday, July - a weekend.
Tomorrow will be Sunday, July - a weekend.

Ray

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Aug 7, 2009, 12:13:35 PM8/7/09
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David Damerell wrote:

> Quoting Numeron <irunsofastine...@hotmail.com>:
>>Whats more annoying IMO is a non-town level with non-hostiles on it.
>>If Im in a dungeon fighting things I dont want to have to tip toe
>>around surrendered enemies,
>
> Why tip-toe? Most games don't attack peacefuls by default.

I think he was referring to any course of action other than
"slaughter" or "flee" as tip-toeing. A third course of action
(or, for some players, even a second) may be perceived as
making things too complicated and subtle, or perhaps just
not cathartic enough, to be satisfying.

Bear


Billy Bissette

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Aug 7, 2009, 2:22:45 PM8/7/09
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Darren Grey <darrenj...@gmail.com> wrote in news:8d684a08-0370-44af-
9639-92c...@l34g2000vba.googlegroups.com:

That's how I'd probably handle it. Getting something to surrender
is effectly getting an early kill. You get XP, you might get items,
you get a special text message, and the critter vanishes. Less
trouble for the player than having to deal with now friendly enemies
cluttering the screen, no issue with the player having to be extra
careful in games where you get punished for hitting friendlies, and
no maintanence or dealing with systems where enemies bounce back and
forth between being aggressive and docile.

Elig

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Aug 8, 2009, 12:41:26 AM8/8/09
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On Aug 5, 9:41 pm, Billy Bissette <bai...@coastalnet.com> wrote:

I don't like monsters fleeing in general either. But if they do flee,
fleeing twice is even worse. The only excuses I can see for fleeing is
to bring friends back, find a better weapon, etc..

For the LOS pathing, the monster would initially make for the
opposite corner of the room which has the highest distance from the
player, it would do this until the door/hallway/etc came into view
(which it would eventually since the monster will cross the entire
room trying to make for the tile of most distance from the player).
Unless down the hallway was closer to the player than the other side
of the room. It will seem to the player as if the monster attempts to
dash out of the corner for the other side of the room until a better
tile comes into view.

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