The AI – ArmA: Armed Assault Talk

Scope of FSM AI editing

I am not sure we will be able to "design the AI to our liking". We can do some stuff with FSM scripts but they are basically just conditionally interconnected normal scripts running for each unit. You are severely limited in influencing the AI that way simply by the available scripting commands which lack many important things when it comes to designing a good AI. Also it hoggs up the CPU pretty badly and there are many things missing or undocumented up until now. However judging from the BIS FSM scripts there is not even such a thing as a variable space for the entire group. I have simulated this in my FSMs with some dirty workarounds but this all goes on cost of efficiency and performance. This means FSM scripts seem to be designed to influence individual unit behaviour trough scripting commands but this does not allow to make a group act intelligently a a whole. As I said I did some workarounds which allow me to use this but even doing simply things like changing the formations will be very bad for the performance of the game.

I have not yet found out if there is a way to edit the real core AI which would be the key to designing an efficient new AI. However I don't expect that we will get access to it and I think we will stay limited to FSM scripts. But as long as we don't have a proper documentation on eventually hidden features of this I fear that it won't allow us to do anything else than we would be able to do anyway with normal scripts.

This is just my experience as I have put a lot of time in editing those FSM scripts lately. If anyone knows more about it I'd be happy to hear about it. Donnervogel 08:57, 10 March 2007 (CET)