» Fri Dec 31, 2010 11:58 am
They had built their AI around singleplayer and had no intention of the AI being used in multiplayer, so it wasnt built with that in mind, i can see why u call that basic data flow (because you want AI in multiplayer), however for what Crytek wanted to achieve it worked perfect for them.
Clearly you didnt understand the point of his flowgraph, yes all it was showing was how to get a model to make a sound to the player when shot, however this isnt even possible in multiplayer without the flowgraph sending the server to client signal, if you placed an AI in multiplayer and shot it, it didnt do anything, Fudsine's flowgraph shows how to make the AI react to the player, from his example you can then build more functions for the AI that can be sent from the server to the client, he wasnt going to post up his entire flowgraph detailing every single server to client flowgraph because it can all be built based off his example.
Btw those links that were posted up arent just ideas, the crysis co-op mod actually worked, there were 4 videos showing multiple players in a server and the AI reacting to each of them (the youtube account has been removed, so videos no longer work), here is the Crymod Thread:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=47988
just reading the thread you can understand that they were able to get the AI working, it was just a very extensive job.
Thankyou for clearing up why you think it is half a game.
Crysis 2 wont be shipping with co-op, however in the editor there appears to be a co-op node for the flowgraphs, seen at some stage in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4SbDkyLyBI&feature=player_embedded
here is an image of it: http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/7825/coopcrysis2.jpg
maybe it will be possible for modders to add it easier this time around.
Interesting. I understood how it could work, but even besides the effort going in to make it work, the amount of proximity triggers tied to every function for every AI mesh in the game and the flow between server to client to server again would bog things down to nearly a standstill (and from what I'm finding in the thread, it seems to be one of the issues they were running into... the AI bogging down the network, even with the limited amount of models they had running), not to mention that the amount of necessary moving parts (so to speak) interacting with eachother would make debugging a near impossible task. I understand why the developers of the game did it that way; I just think it shows a lack of foresight that severely limited its usefulness. The usual model has the player character treated as a client separate from the game server running the AI, even in single player mode on one terminal, so even if it wasn't used initially it still retained the functionality to attach and detach modular clients without having to rewrite (at least not significantly) how the game server interacted with, and shared data with, any particular player.
Hopefully it is the case that they made an adjustment on how the server/client system works, allowing AI to work. If so, then I may give it a go. I'll probably be back after it has come out to see what is being said about the development tools.