a15a1b88ed
## About The Pull Request On one compile of MetaStation, I saw that there's 45 basic mobs on the station, 256 on lavaland (the number growing from tendrils), and 59 in all other z levels combined. While we do expect Lavaland to be visited every round, at least it won't be running during the times when no one is there, but even more importantly, space exploration is something not done every round, so we don't have any reason to waste our resources on AIs that will never be interacted with. Simple animals had an easy solution to this: If no one is on the Z level, their AI turns off If someone is on the Z level, they are idle unless needed. The last simple animals that exists right now are bots, megafauna, geese, gondolas, and some minor ones like mimic, zombie, dark wizard, soulscythe, etc. Point is, we're very much nearly done going through all simple animals, so this code is being wasted just to ensure things like cleanbots won't work if no one is on the z level, something I doubt happens often, so I took their code and made it work for basic mobs instead. I could've done both but I thought it would look very bad, and maybe this is a good incentivize to get more basic mob conversions. There's one major change here and it's that we're missing the "Idle" mode, some basic mobs like the Lavaland village seems to be made with intent that they'll be running even if players aren't around, so this sets up a future PR that makes idle AI easier to add, and I want to make sure those cases are taken into account. ## Why It's Good For The Game We don't need to always be processing these basic mobs, and sets us in the future to hopefully also implement idle AIs. ## Changelog 🆑 balance: Basic mob AIs with no mobs on the Z level now stop. /🆑 --------- Co-authored-by: san7890 <the@san7890.com>
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.