Soldiers AI using aimbots? Or in any case, being way too difficult.

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#241

Interesting informed view there. I think video games generally have to balance reality with fun though, because if a game were to play out exactly how it would really go down in reality, it would be no fun because we’d all be dead. :wink:

That said, I do think a few more nods should be given to the reality side for the HECU. In the interest of fun, they may not need to operate exactly like real life marines, but in the interest of reality, they should be limited in their range/accuracy/detection/reaction abilities to some extent.

#242

Something I’ve noticed is you’re nearly forced to play “hide and snipe” the whole game from my experience. If I was ambushed, I’d just panic and use the MP5 grenades or try use the shotgun since it had optimal short-mid range advantages.

Apart from that, you never get the option to deal with a situation without having to reload or practice.
For example the last QE fight. I had to stand by the stars and snipe. The whole time, because if I moved so much as a muscle out of my hiding spot, they all rushed to me and took out my armor (from like 100) to 0 in 2 seconds.
The only videos I’ve seen on youtube trying to do it well are the people who have practiced it over and over and over and over until they know the location and timing of the HECU spawns, know exactly what weapons to use and know where they should stand. Personally I don’t feel like to enjoy a game I should be made to retry something just to perfect it.

I like sniping, don’t get me wrong. I’m one of those people who play from afar and always panic when they’re surprised or stuck in a short range with people. It’s just I don’t want to ALWAYS be sniping from afar. I want to be able to expand my options and whatnot, but the accuracy/hardness of the HECU says I’m not allowed to.

#243

I have noticed some stuff when playing other games. The example I will be using is Dishonored.

In Dishonored, if you can evade their line of sight, they won’t just rush. They’ll go into a third mode, which I’ll call “suspicious”. In Dishonored, guards will roam for a little while in the area they last saw you, before returning to their post. However, they will now be quicker to spot you and react. In fact, they react in much the same way as the BMS marines do now in regard to time.
In addition, instead of instantly spotting you, you had a chance to pop out, look around, and then get back into cover before you were spotted. I know BMS is hardly a stealth game, but making crouch a bit more like Dishonored’s stealth mode, and changing guard behaviour so they don’t instantly notice you means you can do all the planning and badass execution without the load-save spam.

Tl;dr
Make guards less likely to see you when hidden at a distance.

#244

ai_LOS_mode “1” doesn’t do anything for me right now, they behave exactly the same. Maybe it’s because of engine update. Also, it is possible to escape from them so they go back to idle both with 0 and 1 but it’s pretty hard.

#245

I wonder if it would be possible to include “back ways” that let you sneak around clusters of enemies, an air vent or two, with the occasional headcrab hiding inside

litter it with debris that could possibly attract attention if disturbed though, to make it trickier/risky

#246

I made an account just to say that, I WAS enjoying black mesa on NORMAL until I ran into these nigh impossible to kill 10 shot soaking up beefcake MUHREENS. What the hell guys, these fuckers eat up bullets like hot MREs. In the original half life they were a challenge for me as well but they took 3-4 shots not fucking 10! Then this game throws like 10 of these fuckers at you at once and you have to camp hard as a motherfucker and you try to shoot them with the revolver but the goddamn yellow reticule disappears because the background is yellow and its bright outside, this shit made me rage pretty hard, and I just had to die over and over until I got all perfect headshots in one instance. Video games are supposed to be fun, fighting these high health, psychic, instant reaction, cheap piles of fun killing was total suck. And don’t get me started on that goddamn helicopter, maverick flying that shit around doing loopdeloops and shit while getting blasted with rockets 10 times before going down? Shit! not hard enough better give it perfect accuracy and missiles too.

This is a good mod and it is enjoyable, some of the music is perfect, the graphics are nice but sometimes they confuse me and I ask myself sometimes, what part of half life 1 was this again?, but good god man do something about the difficulty of these soldiers, its really unfair, the tank was fine, make the helicopter easier to kill PLEASE. I feel like when I’m fighting the soldiers its like real life, because If you actually went out and tried to kill 15 marines and a helicopter, you’d get your ass kicked. Actually you know what? No, if you shot a helicopter with one rocket it would go down right away, and nobody takes 7 shots to the chest and then yells MY LEG and keeps shooting at you.

You’ve got a promising future Black mesa, but you need a shit ton of polish

#247

I’ve been enjoying this MOD immensely up until Surface Tension. You guys did an amazing job re-creating the original Half-Life and it’s been a wonderfully nostalgic experience for me since Half-Life was the first video game I ever played.

However, as has been said a thousand times over in this thread, the marines are way, way, way, way, way too difficult. Like retarded difficult… and I’m playing on normal… and I refuse to lower the difficulty to easy.

I’ve played almost every FPS ever made, and this is by far the most difficult game I have ever played, hands down, no contest. The marines need to have less HP, do less damage, or something because this is beyond ridiculous. My enjoyment of this MOD has been ruined by nearly unbeatable enemies who seem to aimbot you nomatter where you are, and take way too many bullets to die… also their MP5’s seem to be SIGNIFICANTLY more accurate than mine which requires nearly an entire clip to be emptied at a range of more than 10 feet whereas from extreme distances they are still able to hit me… and kill me. Like I had sniping competitions with the crossbow vs. an enemy with an MP5… kind of stupid.

My ability to beat enemies is contingent on my ability to trick their A.I. rather than use actual tactics. For example, I have to bottleneck the marines to kill them, and I HATE bottlenecking… it’s such a cheap cop-out tactic and it’s always my last resort, but here I have no choice. Aggro enemies, run back to a room, wait for them to come to the doorway, bottleneck them. Such a lame tactic.

Anyway, I’m going to continue trucking along and beat this thing, but I just wanted to chime in and agree with everyone here, the marines are far, far, far too difficult.

ANNND now the helicopters also take a fucking year to kill… can you guys make hard mode hard, normal mode normal and easy mode easy? Instead of just a universal nightmare mode? It shouldn’t take more than a few rockets to take down a helicopter on normal mode. So far I’ve thrown 6 rockets and emptied my energy gun (is that what it’s called) on it and NOTHING… jesus christ this is literally the most insanely difficult game I’ve ever played.

#248

The MP5 in the hands of the HECU is significantly less accurate than yours (I’ve tested this under controlled conditions… from a burst at medium distance, only about one in three to five bullets from a single grunt will actually hit you if you’re just standing still), and it deals less overall relative damage to you than your MP5 does to them. Perhaps the sheer spray of bullets from several grunts at once is what causes the illusion of greater accuracy, since that causes you to get shot quite often.

Anyway, at medium range, something like three or four MP5 controlled bursts to the neck area (neck to compensate for slight recoil) of a grunt will drop him on Hard. It’s not a terribly difficult thing to do in isolated cases. However, it DOES get harder to pull off when there are several grunts raining fire at you from several angles, combined with little cover or aggressive grenade-throwing.

I’ve done a few MP5-only runs on Hard (well… MP5-only for the HECU grunt combat parts, at least), and I think some of the biggest problems are the lack of good (reliable) cover in certain areas, combined with a large number of aggressive enemies, rather than the HECU being “too tough” or the MP5 being “too weak”. Also, the HEV suit seems to be less of a bullet sponge than it was in Half-Life, as mentioned in another thread somewhere.

I think if anything, it just changes the way you need to play the game. Running and gunning is generally not a good way to go on Hard, and a lot of the time I’ve found myself playing the game more tactically than I did in Half-Life, for example, finding cover and getting good angles to flank them, and trying to close any flanking possibilities on myself. Again, the problem with this is that some parts of the game don’t seem to be designed with this style in mind, and kind of force you to forego cover at the risk of charging into a killzone and get surrounded. The beginning of Surface Tension comes to mind, and while the QE battle has plenty of cover, I find it’s really easy to get flanked if you move out of the stairs in the beginning, which makes the stairs pretty much the best cover for the entire sequence. I don’t know how I feel about that.

#249

I wonder if reducing their accuracy when moving around would be a key ingredient to this problem of fighting the HECU in open areas, since there would be a lack of cover, I imagine they would be moving around a lot, that way the overall damage the player takes could be reduced. Aside from that I do enjoy the fact that they’re not lousy shots overall, but like prisoner881 said, the mp5 is not very reliable for distances of 100+ metres, so maybe it should be made so that it’s almost imposible to hit the player above that distance.

#250

Did they ever fix this for the Steam release?

#251

This thread is over a year old…ask in the appropriate thread.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.