Hench AI shenanigans and upgrade to gated status

Originally Posted by Midnight_Panther

Personally I think the AI has improved a little bit since CoV was launched. At least the pets don't "freak out" any more when some other MM's henchmen in another room or the mission's ally get's attacked. However it is still annoying when you have pets that wont attack due to stuff like Oil Arrow igniting and they all run away as far as they can from it and just stand there.

Originally Posted by Neogumbercules

Don't worry. It's on the list: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=255708

Actually, you can still worry, since I have serious doubts anything will be done to fix these long standing AI issues. Also, as stated, melee/range doesn't matter. If a henchmen doesn't have an attack to use the henchmen will by default run into melee range. This was made worse by the recharge changes in pet AI because many henchmen don't have seamless ranged or melee attack chains. The bitter irony is the justification of taking away recharge was that it was supposed to solve AI issues. >:|

Originally Posted by Lewisite

Too many non-programmers post about AI code. People who aren't programmers should have the good sense to not talk about code, about how hard or easy something would be to implement because you don't know what your talking about. If you don't know what your talking about you shouldn't be talking about it. Common sense, right there.

AI code doesn't have to be that complex, and in this game, its probably nothing more then a few paragraphs of text. I've written AI code for other games before. (Quake, actually, sure its dated but it was far more complex than this game's AI).

Understand this: Video game AI is not like making a *REAL* AI at all. People confuse the two it seems because they equate video game ai as being similarly challenging. Its not. Video game AI is extremely limited and usually quite simple. It doesn't have to be very complex.

Our pet AI sucks because the programmers got extremely lazy and we get to pay for it, and thats the truth of the matter. They probably copied most of the pet ai from the regular mob ai and added a few lines here and there for some mm specific stuff. The code is obviously very bad because the AI is filled with special cases like fleeing from fire and other stuff that overrides more reasonable actions.

Anyone whos actually done even a little bit of game programming -- however amatuer -- should be able to pretty much imagine what this code looks like without any difficulty, programming isn't any sort of mysticism, its very logical and straightforward once you are familiar with the language.

The pet ai isn't a deal breaker for me, but it does irritate me everytime I play the game, which shouldn't happen. I buy my subs year at a time, and even when F2P comes out that won't change anything for me... its not like I'm going to rage quit after all these years or anything. Its just very annoying and I wish they would just spend the time to fix it and instantly make every MM (and other pet classes) happy.