Anyone notice light factoring into AI pathing?

[EPDGaffney]

I have an area in my mod with literally no lights. For the most part, it works fine. The enemies here are custom, and I've done a lot of scripting to get specific effects outside of the traditional AI, and it's generally more than satisfactory.

 

However, when I do need to rely on the standard AI, they just seem...I don't know, stupid. They're running into walls or just standing there. This includes vanilla enemies that may follow me here, like Powder Gangers or Deathclaws. I do notice however that if I use SetCombatDisabled, they seem to know how to navigate all right.

[kingbeast88]

Are they trying to path for cover for some reason? That's the only thing that I can think of that would get disabled from a non combat state.

Edited March 30, 2018 by kingbeast88

[EPDGaffney]

In one case, definitely. I widened the navmesh so that it is larger than the doorway, and my larger enemy will now attempt to get through that doorway (and eventually make it; it is accidentally fantastic and horrifying to watch). When it was too thin, the enemy stood with its back to me at the end of the corridor. The problem with that was that it couldn't always tell when I was poking out through the doorway and I could shoot it to death and it standing there as if this were Fallout 4 or something.

 

This does not explain the other cases, but they're much less important. If you manage to get Deathclaws in here with you, I don't know what you're doing wrong but you need all the help you can get, so I'm fine with whatever happens.

 

I tried SetCombatDisabled only on the large enemy I mentioned, so I'm not sure this was the same thing, but that was my major concern and after widening the navmesh, it's on its way to being the boss fight I'd envisioned.

[kingbeast88]

With a wider navmesh around a doorframe I'd think the collision might be affecting them since their trying to path through or to a tri that they can't reach due to collison. It be cause apparent if you got really far away and had your render distance up since I have seen enemies walk through walls when very far away because the navmesh isn't telling them they cannot and the collsion doesn't seem to affect npc's really far away from what I noticed in game. Not sure if the vanilla invisible wall collision box shares that.

 

If it's an problematic issue I guess an on enter trigger box near the door frame entrance that activates for the boss or large creature with a random percentage chance to tcl for x amount of time would allow them to pass through to the player or a flat out move to command. Not sure if setting them combat disabled would have the same affect to allow them to pass though. It's late for me hope I made sense.

[EPDGaffney]

After widening the navmesh, the enemy does try to come through the doorway, which is what I wanted. I can handle preventing that via script, but I need to fall back on the game's standard AI as a foundation for when I'm not preventing that. The problem was that the standard AI had the enemy convinced it couldn't get there, so it just stood at the other end of the corridor round the corner with its back to the player. This was a serious problem in that the player could step back out from the doorway and the enemy wouldn't attack, even after being attacked.

 

Now that I've widened the navmesh, the enemy will eventually clip through and it's actually pretty terrifying. It has enough HP to take a few hits in the meantime. I plan to try to refine it more with some advanced AI in the script, but this is a good start. I may do some levelled versions as well.