3bc54e7869
## About The Pull Request ~~I wanted to do this after #77700 (wow cool numbers) but nobody has merged it yet despite how simple it is so i'll just hope they don't conflict.~~ Thanks san I'm fucking about with mining mobs with the intention of making them more interesting but not necessarily towards making mining _harder_, but some of these changes unquestionably have done so. These changes are mostly in response to feedback about Watchers who are definitely significantly more threatening than previously, although some of this is user error. - Watchers are annoying when traversing lavaland because they use their ability on you instantly upon acquiring a target, if you are trying to escape other fauna this quickly becomes deadly. - A lot of players don't really realise what the overwatch ability is actually doing and so just complain about getting machine gunned. - If you _do_ react properly to the ability it still makes fighting them take a lot longer than it used to. - The "look away" icon is hard to see in the dark sometimes To ammeliorate these factors I have: - Reduced watcher health by ~20% - Display an alerted graphic over the head of the watcher every time you trigger the overwatch. - Multiple watchers now won't overwatch you at the same time (this made the "penalty" volley essentially become instant death) - The "look away" icon is rendered above the lighting plane so you can always see it - Added a new component which tracks how long a mob has had a specific target. - - Watchers will now only Overwatch you if they've seen you for at least 5 seconds (usually they'll try and shoot at you twice before this). - - Goliaths will only tentacle you if they've seen you for at least 3 seconds. If overwatch is still problematic after this I guess I can just nerf it to not track movement at all and only respond to attacks. ## Why It's Good For The Game I don't want to discourage miners from "actually mining" by having them get sniped just for walking around and the added time-to-kill on these guys could make clearing tendrils more tedious too. ## Changelog 🆑 balance: Watchers have less health balance: You can't be overwatched by several watchers at a time balance: Watchers won't overwatch you instantly upon seeing you balance: Goliaths won't launch tentacles at you instantly upon seeing you /🆑
AI controllers
Introduction
Our AI controller system is an attempt at making it possible to create modularized AI that stores its behavior in datums, while keeping state and decision making in a controller. This allows a more versatile way of creating AI that doesn't rely on OOP as much, and doesn't clutter up the Life() code in Mobs.
AI Controllers
A datum that can be added to any atom in the game. Similarly to components, they might only support a given subtype (e.g. /mob/living), but the idea is that theoretically, you could apply a specific AI controller to a big a group of different types as possible and it would still work.
These datums handle both the normal movement of mobs, but also their decision making, deciding which actions they will take based on the checks you put into their SelectBehaviors proc.
If behaviors are selected, and the AI is in range, it will try to perform them. It runs all the behaviors it currently has in parallel; allowing for it to for example screech at someone while trying to attack them. As long as it has behaviors running, it will not try to generate new plans, making it not waste CPU when it already has an active goal.
They also hold data for any of the actions they might need to use, such as cooldowns, whether or not they're currently fighting, etcetera this is stored in the blackboard, more information on that below.
Blackboard
The blackboard is an associated list keyed with strings and with values of whatever you want. These store information the mob has such as "Am I attacking someone", "Do I have a weapon". By using an associated list like this, no data needs to be stored on the actions themselves, and you could make actions that work on multiple ai controllers if you so pleased by making the key to use a variable.
AI Behavior
AI behaviors are the actions an AI can take. These can range from "Do an emote" to "Attack this target until he is dead". They are singletons and should contain nothing but static data. Any dynamic data should be stored in the blackboard, to allow different controllers to use the same behaviors.
Guides:
Making Your AI: Quickly runs through how to make an ai controller for anything with a step by step development of one.