/vr/ - Retro Games

Experimenting with Doom AI and it's really fun to watch 'em go.

I came up with this system. If an enemy hears the player shoot, they go on more of a "light" chase where they still go after the player, but much slower, and they forget about them after a while.

If they SEE the player they go on full alert and run around like spastics chasing the player down, alerting enemies nearby to go on light alert.

If they get low on health, they run away, and because of the way I've laid my maps out that usually means they go back to where there's more enemies. These enemies are then alerted by this full alert enemy running around to go chase down where the player is. However, since they're still on light alert, if the wounded enemy isn't nearby bouncing around the walls screaming that the British are coming, they eventually fuggedabout it and go back to their spawn state.

After testing this out a lot, I realized exactly why Wolfenstein 3D went from a stealth game to an action game.

This system, while INCREDIBLY amusing to watch while notargeted, in all practical terms means 95% of the time when you fire a shot, then all of the enemies in the map haul ass towards your location and assrape you.

Realistic, maybe. Robust, absolutely. But not fun at all.

Maybe if I add some sort of mechanic where the player is invisible until they start shooting or an enemy bumps into them, like ZDoom stealth monster logic but applied to the player. That way the player can watch all this behavior and go wowee this is neat. But nah, pretty complex for a Doom mod.

I think I'll make the AI more combat-oriented like the Skaarj in Unreal, but that was some advanced shit.