But surely they’d have had enough time to regroup and evaluate supply levels, transferring ammunition if needs be, by this point?
And Xuri, I wasn’t being sarcastic, you actually are more on topic than the tangent we’re on.
Sorry, I red your post as in “you are not at all on topic”
My mistake, I will delete my post immediatly
EDIT: duh, can’t delete them in this forum 
I think we’re witnessing a semantic argument here, if you get what I mean.
Is good AI the development of new emergent behaviours, more complex decision making, etc? Welll… yes, from an AI programmer or AI theorist viewpoint.
Is good AI something that feels right when you shoot at it and it shoots at you? Welll… yes, from a gamer’s viewpoint.
Both viewpoints are valid. Neither are wrong.
I agree, those are the 2 viewpoints.
Still, in a video game, I find it obvious that developpers should concentrate on the second one.
The thing is that even with good IA (in a programmer’s point of view), there are other factors that can ruin the feeling of the gunfights, such as the enemy’s resistance, the damage they deal to you, their speed…
In hl2 those factors are imho not well balanced : the combines die almost instantly, they deal little damage and they are slooow…
Therefore, even if their reactions are more complexe than in other/older games (which I doubt), they whill never be challenging and therefore interesting and rewarding to fight.
I like the fact that the BMS devs are also taking into account NPC placement within the level to increase the impression of better AI.
The devs working on FEAR also did this, they say that their AI isn’t that much better than other games’ but that by making use of constricting environments and props that the AI can take advantage of they seem smarter.
Couldn’t you have it where if the grenade landed close to a soldier, they kicked it away from them in a generally random direction to avoid being obliterated, rather than going through the whole ‘picking it up and throwing it’ business?
I agree somewhat Xuri, though the most effective route to the second behaviour can be more effectively found by aiming for the first.
Otherwise you wind up with enemies that feel good in a fight but only until you start to behave in a way the coders weren’t expecting or hit upon a tactic they’re not coded for. Like the grunts in Half Life one, to some extent.
Because that would make it exceedingly difficult to successfully kill them with grenades :meh:
They’re not super soldiers with superhuman reflexes.
Absolutely no reason why they can’t blow themselves up trying…
Less chance compared to bending over and picking them up first 
So bake it for a bit, no way for them to know that it’s about to explode…
To the dude who was complaining about good AI not meaning more complex AI…
How well an AI acts is directly correlated to the number of components that go into making a gameplay decision. And of course, if you want realism, you have to throw in a few “errors” such as a 0.01% chance of flee on sight, a 5% chance of kamikaze on sight, and then the dozens (hundreds) of if statements (Well, we’re programming bots for UT3 and battling them in AI Programming class, and we are using mostly if statements, dunno exactly what terminology HL2 AI uses) determine actions in the interim.
The less things an NPC looks at, the less ‘aware’ it will be, and the ‘stupider’ it will look/act. And a good part of AI code is setting it’s awareness. It has to know that it can’t see the entire map. Cut that part out and you’re putting the player at a disadvantage. You want an NPC to have alert states. Totally unaware and unprepared for battle (player has just entered the area), slightly on edge (player has made noise [shot, or maybe killed a enemy not too far away]), ready (player is very close or active in the killings [lol]), active (taken out of any idle states, and is now actively looking to pick a fight with the player), and engaged (Fighting the player). At the engaged state, it starts looking at the if statements and whatnot I mentioned earlier to decide what tactics to use. The less choices, the less diverse, the less ‘intelligence’ this artificial construct seems.
Now, like I said, I don’t know exactly what AI looks like in HL2, but those are the fundamentals of AI as stated by our professor.
Also, a big easy about AI: the longer they live the more real they act.
I think it would also be a big step in the right direction if NPCs that were going to throw grenades back wouldn’t even have to wait for it to land. If you could make a soldier move into the path of a grenade while it’s in the air, catch it & throw it back. It would save a good bit of the animation time, but probably not worth coding, and could risk being too cheap.
Alright, they’re soldiers, not professional softball players.
Maybe the grunts played too much CODMW/2 and thought that they could pick up the grenades and throw them back?
Resulting in MUCH gibbing.
Let me put it this way. Seeing Soldiers using their pistols instead of their SMG’s, Shotguns, or Grenades tells you they aren’t doing to well. Even during Forget About Freeman, you see pockets of Soldiers, and they seem well equipped and ready to fight. However, if we had some of them using pistols, and not using grenades, it would show that they are actually running desperately low on equipment.
(would’ve responded to this earlier, but didn’t notice it)
Sounds fair…
Dude, the perfect Hgrunt AI would be soldiers above providing covering fire while troops below advance, and use cover (like corners, sand bags and other stuff), not improvise it.
It wouldn’t make a difference, but I think it would be cool if when you kill a soldier, and theres a few around him, one will drag him back into cover (which isn’t actually hard to code, I know), while another provides suppressive fire. It would make it feel like your actually killing PEOPLE. Unlike HL1, where the HECU soldiers weren’t particularly bothered when their buddies explode from a grenade to the face.
Hopefully the grenades don’t glitch out. It would be pretty cool, also, if they could use the grenade launcher attatchments on their guns.
I don’t know, It would make it seem like your actually fighting soldiers, not just dudes with guns. The more tactical they are, the more impressed the player would be.