Grimbot wrote:Sadly, I built most of my Dungeon Planet before realizing that it absolutely wasn't going to work. All of my pieces are separate-- the walls, floor, and ceiling, but I cannot get allies to walk across the floors and 90% of the monsters don't react when I enter their room. I'm guessing that my low-hanging stalactites might have something to do with it now. Thanks for posting this!

Hey Grimbot, I have you buddied and seen the props you have been working on. I figured you would run into a problem sadly. Looking forward to your dungeon planet.

Your low hanging stalactites are the issue. You have to think of every object being contained in a box that can contain the objects entire volume.

When setting up rooms, you have to think in terms of those bounding boxes. Floor, walls, ceiling, and other details need to be separate. Care needs to be taken into account for bounding boxes that might cut off awareness.

So if you have a ceiling with two stalactites on it then the bounding box is going to be as wide as that entire object and as high and deep. If the stalactites are separate, then the box will contain just the stalactite "cone" in it. If its low enough it will mess with the line of sight of an npc and essentially act like a wall.

Also ai will not transition surfaces. They need to either stay on the ground surface or stay on the floor surface you created. They can navigate the floors though if no bounding boxes block them.

You can still create your mission, but its just going to be a bit more tedious to do so. Get ready to LOTS of testing.

It's best to create a test mission file that you don't publish, to test out your concepts roughly first. Then go and make all your awesome little details after you know things work. A lot of people are getting frustrated because they didn't test and just expected things to work after they spent 20 hrs building stuff. That's backwards. Make stuff after proof of concept. Saves you time.

this whole thing makes sense, but the strange thing is, this doesn't seem to be the case with certain buildings.

I have a creature that is in a tower, and there is a roof over its head and everything, and the AI doesn't, seem to mess up with it. (the building is one single unit) however, in the same adventure, there is another building with a creature on it, and its AI gets severely messed up. doesn't make sense.

DVDMaster wrote:...I've not done any real move to/patrol tests. But it does seem that NPC can follow paths through spaces they cannot see through if you give them markers. Would those NPCs wander of the building if you didn't tell them to patrol and just wander?...

I mentioned before that the patrol path still works despite their visual impairment inside buildings. And if I let them wander, they storm off into any given direction and get stuck near a wall, not quite knowing what is going on. They appear to have a question mark next to their mood smiley.

Andeavor wrote:

DVDMaster wrote:...I've not done any real move to/patrol tests. But it does seem that NPC can follow paths through spaces they cannot see through if you give them markers. Would those NPCs wander of the building if you didn't tell them to patrol and just wander?...

I mentioned before that the patrol path still works despite their visual impairment inside buildings. And if I let them wander, they storm off into any given direction and get stuck near a wall, not quite knowing what is going on. They appear to have a question mark next to their mood smiley.

that little question mark is there to let you know there is a problem with the ai being able to execute it routine. Problems with pathing, behaviors, accomplishing goals etc... cause it to appear.

Double_Helix wrote:that little question mark is there to let you know there is a problem with the ai being able to execute it routine. Problems with pathing, behaviors, accomplishing goals etc... cause it to appear.

I knew that meant something.

DRAZiACH wrote:this whole thing makes sense, but the strange thing is, this doesn't seem to be the case with certain buildings.

I have a creature that is in a tower, and there is a roof over its head and everything, and the AI doesn't, seem to mess up with it. (the building is one single unit) however, in the same adventure, there is another building with a creature on it, and its AI gets severely messed up. doesn't make sense.

It may not be the building that the NPC is standing on but some other building that blocks the view of the NPC.
I really like putting up extra NPC with:
SHOOT XXX
IDLE DANCE ALWAYS
as the AI. then by viewing the NPC behavior, I can often figure out the awareness issue.

Also remember, it is only a subset of the AI stuff that has problems -- anything depending on awareness. The captain can talk to or give without a problem. Often the NPC can follow and may attack if attacked.

I can take a look, if you want.
1. Add "(do not play)" to the title of your adventure.
2. Lock the captain.
3. Share your creation.
4. Post a link to the adventure here, with a description of the specific problems you are having (what each NPC should be doing)
Steps 1 & 2 are to minimize the chance that others will try to play the adventure.

I tried doing my test with the wander command instead of the patrol command. They do wander outside of the building if there is no floor, but there are some caveats. If their wander area crosses a wall, they may get really confused and try to walk all the way around the building, even outside their wander area. Once they reach the place they were trying to get to, they seem to forget what they were doing in the first place.

Double_Helix wrote:
You can still create your mission, but its just going to be a bit more tedious to do so. Get ready to LOTS of testing.

Yeah. That's why I've only released one adventure so far.

Most of my ideas, it turns out, were a bit beyond the scope of GA...

Grimbot wrote:

Double_Helix wrote:
You can still create your mission, but its just going to be a bit more tedious to do so. Get ready to LOTS of testing.

Yeah. That's why I've only released one adventure so far.

Most of my ideas, it turns out, were a bit beyond the scope of GA...

I hear you... I was all pumped with drawn out floor plans from multiple angles yesterday evening, and I even started building the bridge to this starship in my level... then I came and read the updated thread about the same time last night, and realized I was in for some major changes. I managed to create working set of pieces for the bridge, with very few bounding box areas. What I've also noticed (but have yet to test again) is that if the bounding box is only at the NPC's waist-level or so, it will still be aware of you. So, in some cases, half walls are okay, unless your captain is incredibly small (as one of my test captains proved).

All it not lost for your dungeon planet though, I think, Grim. It may seem like a major pain in the butt, but you could try what I did when testing awareness and bounding boxes for my starship bridge.

Basically, I loaded the whole bridge building into editor, and then I would, say, delete all pieces except the floor. Save As New as "Bridge Floor" (do not replace original of course!). Then, reload the complete bridge building again, this time, removing all parts except the southern wall. Save As New as "Bridge Southern Wall".... and so on and so on. This way, you won't have to completely rebuild everything, since the smaller, individual objects still exist inside the original "whole" building object.

Furthermore, I lumped together as many parts on the same plane as possible... for example, the east and west walls of the bridge consist of three walls of tall, medium, and low height, overlapping. Instead of saving each one of those individually, I saved one object that contained all three pieces, since they all run along the same plane.

Hopefully that helps, or you've probably already thought of that!

I got pretty far into Dungeon Planet before realizing I had to start over. I filled up the complexity meter waaay too quickly with all of my decor and knick-knacks. I realize that I can't have a mine AND a dungeon in one mission, so I'll probably save the mine for another day. Which is good, because I'd need a new ceiling for the mine anyway.

For now I'm working on tightening up a final version of "Red Hot Rescue" and I'm almost done with a fun little garbage planet I've been using as a test-bed for stuff. I included some of my "Rebel Scum" pieces and they seem to work pretty flawlessly. The creatures inside seem to be able to see me, though I've noticed that once I kill one the other goes into "panic mode" and starts running around screaming. I wish that was something I could control, but... good enough!

I've pulled apart some larger stuff in the editors and it does help quite a bit!

I'm learning more and more every day! The hard way, I guess, but it's learnin'!

Yep, I hear ya... in a way, it's really slowing up some of my adventure creation, but at the same time, it's also neat figuring these things out on our own and also figuring them out in a community setting, during discussion. I think that people who don't use the Sporum for these things may be really getting royally confused, or worse yet, they don't even debug their adventures anyways, which is the cause of the weird, glitchy missions out there. As a creator, I always try my best to make top notch stuff, within my ability, and so this awareness/bounding box thing is a great discovery that will help us make even better levels for people.

Prometheus09 wrote:
I hear you... I was all pumped with drawn out floor plans from multiple angles yesterday evening, and I even started building the bridge to this starship in my level... then I came and read the updated thread about the same time last night, and realized I was in for some major changes. I managed to create working set of pieces for the bridge, with very few bounding box areas. What I've also noticed (but have yet to test again) is that if the bounding box is only at the NPC's waist-level or so, it will still be aware of you. So, in some cases, half walls are okay, unless your captain is incredibly small (as one of my test captains proved).

From what I can tell the visibility test goes from the head (eyes?) of the captain to center of mass(?) of the NPC. So things waist high should be ok.

DVD: Yeah, that was my hypothesis in GA, and when I tried it, it worked. I placed one creature under a wall+balcony object, and another in a square of waist-high boxes. Set their behaviors the same, to Dance when aware of me. And yep, sure enough, only the one in the waist-high boxes danced. Although, oddly, sometimes the other creature danced, perhaps because depending on his angle, his head was hanging outside of the balcony's bounding box.

Gah... new update, and weird one at that. I've been building this starship bridge level for a while now, just a small part of the five or six large "levels" I plan to include in this next mission (and perhaps reuse for forthcoming missions... sort of like a homebase).

So I have played extensively with bounding boxes, etc... everything I've made seems alright, as long as it doesn't stretch too far across any one important plane xyz).

Howver, I finally finished the floor and walls of my bridge, and so I decided to start capping it off with a ceiling (towards the back), with attached "window frame" pieces. Mind you, this all exists along the x and y axes, not the z (up/down) axis. Also, it is placed at least two levels above the ground floor of the bridge.

So my awareness test character was on the bridge ground level, and I added the ceiling/roof object. This overhangs part of the bridge floor where the test NPC is standing, BUT, the bounding box should not extend that far downward, since it is incredibly thin along the z axis, and is two levels above the ground level.

Yet, the NPC will not see me when the ceiling is placed on the bridge... like, WHAT? I understand this bounding box concept very well now, but I can't see why a flat object, two floors above, would affect the awareness of a creature on the ground level?

I wish I could explain better, but sheesh... at least the FRONT part of the bridge is still out of this weird and unexpected bounding box limit.

Prometheus09 wrote:
So my awareness test character was on the bridge ground level, and I added the ceiling/roof object. This overhangs part of the bridge floor where the test NPC is standing, BUT, the bounding box should not extend that far downward, since it is incredibly thin along the z axis, and is two levels above the ground level.

Yet, the NPC will not see me when the ceiling is placed on the bridge... like, WHAT? I understand this bounding box concept very well now, but I can't see why a flat object, two floors above, would affect the awareness of a creature on the ground level?

I wish I could explain better, but sheesh... at least the FRONT part of the bridge is still out of this weird and unexpected bounding box limit.

Providing a link to the adventure or pictures of the problem might help.

One thing I've not yet done is figure out what happens to the bounding box if your rotate the object. I have no idea what happens if you take a flat piece like a floor and rotate it 90 degrees to it becomes a wall or rotate a wall so it becomes a ceiling. From a computational stand point, it is easiest of the box coordinates are relative to the planet surface, so that the walls of the bounding box are always perpendicular to the ground (assuming a flat ground).

The other thing I want to explore is where the bounding boxes/visibilities rules are different for disguised gates.