Thanks for writing this. We do like useful feedback
It's kinda late here right now, so we'll get back to you in-depth shortly
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| Impressions. http://www.runestorm.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=109&t=77724 |
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| Author: | Lusketrollet [ Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:29 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Impressions. |
Warning - long post ahead. I didn't really intend for the post to be this massive, but it sort of snowballed as I went. I would like to start this post by saying that although I have thus far not been active on the forum, I have followed the development of Rooks Keep since way back when it was only a Chess-game. I was a great fan of Ballistic Weapons for UT2K4 way back in the day, and when I eventually learned about The Crucible - somewhat late in the mod's lifetime, I am sad to confess - I carried that enthusiasm over to the new mod. When I learned that you were working on a standalone game, I immediately decided that this was a game I wanted to keep my eye on. Now that the game is out; I would like to open with saying that one of the things that surprised me the most, was how utterly polished it is. All the features of the game appear to be fully realized with equal attention, both the Chess-modes and the Deathmatch-modes: No game modes or in-game features immediately appear to have been under-prioritized. The maps are also surprisingly many while at the same time all managing to maintain a personal identity - they all even have a very different look, which isn't even common for many AAA-titles. I don't feel I have played the game enough to talk about multiplayer balance, especially as I have so far only played with AI bots and the game's focus on asymmetry makes it a somewhat difficult subject to tackle so early. That said: A good portion of this post is going to be dedicated to the Bot AI. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, I take a professional interest in AI, and always consider games with multiplayer Bots to have gone an extra mile in ensuring audience enjoyment. Secondly, all the matches I've played in the two days since the game was released were against Bots, as I have previously pointed out, and as such I feel more qualified to discuss that than I do regarding other topics. (Such as, again, balance). The Bots in this game are good. They appear to have all the abilities human players have, complete with in-game leveling-up on the spot. They use their abilities smartly and in what I consider to be sensible situations. However, they have some (fairly) significant problems on the larger scale of things. --- Firstly, it appears that the second a Bot has spawned, it immediately decides upon a specific goal that it pursues blindly, with seemingly zero attention to the outside world. This "goal" appears to be something like moving to a particular spot to pick up a Powerup, or attack a particular enemy. Whatever the case, this means that the Bot will robotically make a beeline to the location in question no matter if it's on the other side of the map, often brushing past- or bumping into several opposing characters on the way without even a sideways glance. Occasionally, it might make a single, half-arsed swipe with its weapon, but rarely even that. The only way to make them break off from that behaviour, appears to be by attacking them directly. The second they get hit by a weapon or projectile, they'll immediately forget absolutely everything, drop everything they're doing and single-mindedly turn to attack the offender with a zealous tenacity that would have been awesome, had it only been better placed. There are of course numerous issues with this behaviour, namely that it makes the Bots predictable and exploitable - even as far as Bots go - but also that it... just doesn't look very good, you know? It's hard to get somewhat immersed in a barbaric, quasi-Medieval battle when you look out on the scene playing off in front of you and see half the warriors fighting and the other half running blindfolded in a straight direction past several enemies who are also running blindfolded in a straight direction. Occasionally, a Bot might decide to attack an enemy who is already blindly pursuing another enemy (who is already pursuing an enemy who is already pursuing an enemy, etc. etc.), leading to a ridiculous Conga-line of people chasing each other's tails. Which brings me neatly to my second issue. In team-based modes, roughly 50% of the Bots of a given team will band together to follow a single friendly Bot around the map. This behaviour is problematic in general, but particularly so in larger matches with more Bots. In either case, you get this scenario where you have one large mob running about the map, mopping up stragglers for the whole game. This does not make for very good gameplay. In this scenario, the player gets presented with two options: (S)he joins the mob, spending the entire match ganging up on isolated enemies and swarming them, all competing like vultures to get the most blows in on the helpless enemy; or, alternatively, the player joins the stragglers, and might get some decent duels in before (s)he is in turn also ganged-up on by someone and needs to leg it. In either case, it doesn't exactly make for an ideal gameplay experience. At its very worst, a whole match might devolve into two opposing mobs running around on opposite sides of the map, lapping up stragglers as they go. Occasionally, only one of the teams will appear to exhibit this behaviour and will end up winning decisively. It also has the unfortunate bi-effect of really messing with the dynamics of a given map. Take a large, open map like "Barrens of Kurdan" as an example of this. Instead of all the combatants being distributed evenly across the real-estate like they're supposed to, you get this weird situation where the overwhelming majority of the map is completely empty, with a few little pockets of activity scattered far about. I don't really have any immediate suggestions on how to fully eliminate these two issues. In the case of the former, I'm not sure if the problem boils down to Bot waypoints (I'll elaborate on that soon), or if a bit of a re-write of the AI might be in order. In the case of the latter; having Bots following each other doesn't have to be an issue in itself, but I think the behaviour needs to be modified and tweaked severely. Perhaps lower the percentage of Bots doing the following, for starters. --- It should be mentioned that I recognize both these behaviours from UT3. The first issue tended to vary from map to map, and tended to be evidence of incompetent Bot waypoint design rather than a problem with the game itself. The second issue, of Bots forming mobs, wasn't really that much of a problem in UT3, because the ranged weapon-based gameplay lent itself better to that behaviour, and the AI simply handled it much more smartly. The reason this occurred in UT3, was that it was possible to give Bots orders such as "Follow Me" or "Stay Here". If the player didn't give any orders at all, the Bots would default to the behaviour of half of them following the player, and the other half seeking out the enemy. And because the opposing AI-controlled team obviously didn't have any player to give them orders, they would behave like this all the time. I know Rooks Keep is based on the UT3 engine, so it makes me wonder if the game re-uses some of that code for its Bots? If so, the problems appear much more pronounced in Rooks Keep, so you might want to have a look at the code and alter it with the very different demands of this game in mind. I have some more issues I would like to discuss that are not related to Bots, but I think I'll save that for a separate post somewhere along the line so as not to clutter this already way too large post with even more text. |
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| Author: | ShadowBlade [ Mon Jun 17, 2013 4:43 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Impressions. |
Thanks for writing this. We do like useful feedback It's kinda late here right now, so we'll get back to you in-depth shortly
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| Author: | Captain Xavious [ Mon Jun 17, 2013 5:09 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Impressions. |
Oh man, I can't believe I didn't notice this when testing. The weird priorities out the gate seemed infrequent enough with a large roster of bots I didn't think it was much more than some weird quirk and have never really seen it happen very often. As for the mobs, I didn't even think of it as a bot problem, I just kept telling them you need ways to break up large group combat and ways to manage it better.  Balance, that's something I had a hard time testing for. There seemed to be a limited amount of testers to really get a good feel for it. When I was playing bots I never really seen much that stuck out other than maybe the bash ability, though that has been toned down from what it was originally. I'd personally love to see how the balance plays out with a sizable amount of competitive players (kind of wonder if the different factions don't have inherent advantages due to animations + timing changes). Also, I highly recommend a 1on1 match with a Warlord (max) difficulty bot. Holy smokes do they know what they're doing. |
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| Author: | ShadowBlade [ Tue Jun 18, 2013 6:06 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Impressions. |
Until our resident lead coder jumps on and lets you know his thoughts, I will say that we'll probably be improving things with subsequent patches
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| Author: | DarkCarnivour [ Wed Jun 19, 2013 4:51 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Impressions. |
Wow, quite a long post. Thanks for your feedback, glad you like BW and RooksKeep. Also, glad you noticed the work that went into polishing RK as much as possible. I did try to make the bots as good as possible within the development constraints, but of course they are not perfect and could always use improvement. They do use a weighted prioritization system for choosing goals, but yeah, they are pretty one-track minded with performing them. Further development of the AI would definitely be to expand on this and give them better handling of sub-tasks as well as tweaking the weighting. We may also be able to add more types of goals, such as helping other players or defending territory. Upgrading the bots to possibly recognize macro situations would also make things more interesting. That would likely be a challenge. RK doesn't re-use UT bot code, but it is quite possible that some thing are implemented similarly given that they are both operating in the same technical environment. I can see where ranged weapons would make it easier to reduce obvious AI weaknesses. Having a game centered on melee combat did make things a bit more tricky. As for navigation and the waypoints... let's just say it wasn't fun. I was tempted to scrap it all and try to write my own system at times, but in the end we had to get it working within a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps we'll be lucky down the line and the navigation mesh system in UDK will be sufficiently usable in a newer UDK version that we could implement navigation with that. Thanks for your expansive feedback, hopefully we'll be able to continue improving the AI and the rest of the game.
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| Author: | Lusketrollet [ Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:07 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Impressions. |
Thank you for all the very informative replies.
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