I recently came up with an idea about AI in multiplayer.

This has a
0.000000001% chance of making me a HCE genius by luck
or MOST DEIFINTELY a
99.9999999999% chance of making me sound like some crazy drunken idiot.

a biped attached to a portable trigger volume scripted to shoot at a certain thing a t a certain time from a certain place.

:Derp.
Dont blame me, random stroke of stupidity while talking to Zekilik about scoreboards.

Discusss about how wrong I was and why.
:P

But if it's a biped and trigger volumes and scripts, it isn't really considered an AI.... is it?

I don't really know anything about the matter. I'm a modder, not a rocket surgeon. :P
But the way you say it makes it sound really simple. And as long as people have been trying to get synchronized AI into multiplayer, I'm sure that everything vaguely resembling "simple" has already been tried.
Edited by Echo77 on Jul 19, 2011 at 05:01 AM

cheap AI imitation, but still. would like to talk to Kirby about this or Gamma or someone.

Actually no, its probably stupid

It's worth exploring. I'm sure someone could find a use for it if it works. :P

Its been suggested before, and I don't think it'll work, for various reasons: Firstly, unless you're going to have the trigger fire randomly, which might not sync, then you're going to have a fixed time of fire, for example in beam emitters (come to think of it those also don't sync in the first place).

Next, if that works, you're going to have a stationary biped that fires a fixed projectile at fixed points and that's not exactly what an AI is anyway.

Lol. I'm not even going to attempt to try to attempt to figure it ot becase I know absolutely nothing about scripting.

This is nearly the exact topic which grunt_eater created a couple months back, in which people tried to tell me it was "AI" if a vehicle were teleported forward over a flat model with markers and such.

Why don't you just do what I did? Make vehicles that look like each of the limbs, without any physics or collision. Place all these vehicles in globals.globals or use host testing to create them (DO NOT LET CLIENTS MAKE DOUBLES) and then place your enemy as a biped in sapien, objects_attach and objects_detach spammed over and over again (sleep 30 between each run) and ai_attach to make the biped into AI. In the weapon they are holding, uncheck "projectile are client side" What this flag does is make it so every player makes their own projectiles on their screen.. when its unchecked, the host controls all projectiles made by that gun type. Now the host decides all projectiles for that gun. Since these vehicles are detached for a short period of time, their location is synced to clients, and they know where the enemy is. Have it teleport the biped away on death so they dont see the vehicles laying there and mistake them for a living enemy.

Additional things you may want to do is make the biped itself invisible since the limbs floating around are its representation, or host testing to make the biped itself if your not making the biped invisible so that they dont see copies.

Only problems are, first of all homing weapons don't see the AI on client computers, so go with a human weapon set for players. Next, since on clients they arent there, your shots will apear to go through.. You can always make the vehicles have collision and damage, and script all the damage to sync between them and the biped if you truely wish.

So, lets go over what this all accomplishes. You have a representation of the AI that shows up on all screens. The projectiles shot are all absolute; If it can be seen, then its real. (seriously, all that explanation, and two things accomplished lol)