NPC AI... Why are they still behaving like before Server Meshing? Sometimes a bit better, sometimes worse, but the issues seem to be the same from the players' point of view.asked by Raul127

So Server Meshing has been amazing. I think it's definitely delivered on what we needed from the technology. And I think it has lifted server frame rate, which I would hope means people in general have a better experience. But there's still a lot more we want to do to get server frame rate up, which will help NPCs, because in general NPCs can be perceived as slow to react, because they need a little bit of time to cook. They need a few frames from the server to get all the decisions made. So if you are unfortunately on a server that isn't performing at the rate we want, then it could be a bit slower.

There's also a condition we know of that we need to solve, which is related to large areas streaming in at once, which can cause server stalls, like we've seen with Siege, and that's something that we're tracing. Solutions are on the way to resolve that. It's a lot of deep engine work here, because we need to parallelize a phase of the initialization of entities.

We should be cautious of attributing every AI issue to server performance. Sometimes we do just see genuine issues or glitches or bugs and things like that. We just work through them, we fix them. There's a bunch of good work been done recently, right?

Well, that's what I was going to point out: we've been developing upgraded behaviors for our AI. Obviously, we've been tuning this work in Squadron 42. At this point, that work is completely signed off, and we're very happy with those new behaviors. This touches on many elements and many systems, which is why we can't bring it back right away. But we're talking about balancing the perception system and vision system so that the AIs, the NPCs, are a lot smarter about picking their targets. The ticket system tuning: this is something that in Siege of Orison we've actually seen, because this is one of the instances or areas that we've had the most active AIs in. And you could see that there are load balancing systems in place when many AIs are in the same area, where the server is going to give a certain amount of budget to each AI. And that's tuned for the current game. Siege of Orison had 10 times more AIs in general. So you could see how the load balancing wasn't perfect. This we're tuning on the SC side, but there's been massive work on this. We have a lot of changes related to how the tactical queries actually operate, which is how AIs actually plan their work. So there's quite a bit of work that has been done and completed there that really changes the behaviors in general. SC still uses an older set of roles for AIs in general: pusher, defender and strafer are the major three archetypes that we use on SC. We have a lot more roles now that are available in this new version of the AI subsystems that we need to bring back, including things like using cover, relocating between cover properly.

And so that's better tuned for a large population of NPCs. There's more roles available to pick. So if there's only five pushers, then obviously if you have a population of 70 trying to engage, then you need a few more roles.

Much richer behaviors will also allow things like not having to put as many AI agents in one area, because they can all be more effective.

It's like a double dip of improvement as well. The more roles you have, the more varied those roles will be, the less intense some of them may be in terms of performance requirements and things like that, which helps with performance, obviously. And then, like you said, greater variety of AI behaviors and archetypes means maybe a need for fewer AI, which again will help with performance.

Also potentially easier for the client to predict what an AI is going to do when they know what the role is, if the role is more defined.