Bumbleson on 24/6/2005 at 21:07

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I already tried that, but it got me nowhere. The problem seems to be that dropped weapons are generally ignored. The relevant change types on an object only determine what could *potentially* be of interest to AIs. In one of the AI models (don't remember if it was sensory, behavior or something else) you can specify what change types the owner of this model will react to. However, this unspecific information doesn't tell the AI to necessarily change alert state when seeing such an object. In other words: seeing a dropped sword is basically the same as seeing a rat. As long as nothing special is happening, the sword will be ignored. And even if you could make the AI freak out when seeing an "out of place" object, it would do so too for every other object with the same flag, which wouldn't always fit the situation.

A promising alternative was the visibility-to-alertness mapping that is also done in one of the models. But I couldn't find out how exactly it works and if it can be abused for this purpose. Maybe someone else can.

Crispy on 25/6/2005 at 04:06

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Rats. (Pun intended.)

Is there an unused change type? Gas or Smoke, perhaps? (Has anyone seen AIs react to seeing gas or smoke? I think I've seen one react to a mis-thrown gas bomb, but I don't remember.) If we could provoke a reaction through those and attach our own sounds... (Possibly ones in the existing schemas, but hand-picked so that they make sense and we don't have guards grieving for the poor dead sword or hallucinating blood.)

For reference, here is a list of all the change types:
CHANGE_Moving
CHANGE_Missing
CHANGE_OutOfPlace
CHANGE_Damaged
CHANGE_Destroyed
CHANGE_Malfunctioning
CHANGE_Disabled
CHANGE_OpenClosed
CHANGE_OnOff
CHANGE_MissingAlly
CHANGE_Spooked
CHANGE_Burning
CHANGE_Smoke
CHANGE_Gas
CHANGE_LiveGrenade
CHANGE_BloodPuddle



I poked around and could only find it attached to AI Pawns. (If anyone wants to see it themselves, open up the Actor Browser and go to Actor->Pawn->AIPawn->Properties->LightLevel->LightLevelToVisibilityLookup.) It's empty by default on the level properties and on all non-AI objects (all the ones I looked at, anyway, which included things that are considered evidence). I suspect that it's an AI-specific setting, and therefore useless for our purposes. Though you could probably use it to give AIs uber see-in-the-dark capabilities. (Or even reverse it to create AIs who can see things in the dark but not brightly lit objects - now that would be an interesting FM gimmick! I hereby claim it as my own. ;) )

Crispy on 25/6/2005 at 07:23

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Ah, I see. That's what I get for not rereading your earlier posts closely enough. :)

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff under there. VisibilityAlertnessMap doesn't look particularly promising to me, unless we can give the sword a unique visibility value that no other object has. (Say, really large, or negative.) Even then, I think it would have to have a "change type" triggered before the VisibilityAlertnessMap is even considered.

I noticed that the default sensory models seem to be ignoring a few change types; damaged and malfunctioning, for instance. If we can make sure that nothing already in the game is emitting those change types, we could in theory use them for things like this sword.

What AI barks they'd end up using is anyone's guess, though...