Ahhh grasshopper, you learn well!
Great video (y'all need to do me a tutorial on how to do this, I d\l'ed CamStudio btw so is this a good tool?. Hint Hint
Love the blue and red vehicles and interesting remake of Bocage? I see you set up the crossing at the river and I did this to my copy, but I used smig's totally kewl pontoon bridge custom and it is a much better solution. Also leave the vehicles out and it works much better. If you want a link to the pontoon bridge let me know.
Quick edit. Here is smig's pontoon bridge.
- Smig's custom Pontoons Bridge. Image by Smig.
Here I have it placed in a map.
- Pontoons bridge placed in map.
It can be downloaded along with his other great models
here. Of course if you use them give credits. (note he has thumbnail issues, so just rt click open in a new tab)
Btw you can run this from a "additionalStaticObjects.con" file run from SinglePlayer .cons only. If you don't know how, ask me.
You do realize that proper pathmapping means less "tweaking" of the waypoints right? I mean you have done great don't get me wrong, but I just want all to understand this. By this I mean very neatly whiting out ALL areas of the map that bots don't need to go or will not use anyhow. Be sure and study your smallones well and white out areas to reduce the un-needed and smaller do go areas. I will show this by example but for now this will suffice. I guess what I am trying to get everybody to understand is the do go and no go areas in each info tile and how and they are formed.
I will be passing you more pathmap information but ...
I guess now I need to do a thread on Strategic Areas (henceforth refereed to as SA's), what they are, what they do, and how they control where and when the bots move about the map. This new knowledge combined with what you have learned about the pathmaps will farther your ability to control how the bots use and follow the pathmaps. It is the conditions of the SA's that you use to create your strategies. Think about this for a minute. When setting up SA's one of the settings is ...
AIStrategicArea.addNeighbour SA_Name
... By default both BFSPC & Bontinator connect all SA's to each other, but you can see right off that this is not a good idea. Second they only create SA's for the controlpoints. You can create as many SA's as you want (that are not control points of course), but it's best to keep them to a minium. Feel free to experiment of course. For instance you can create say two extra SA's connected from the main base and this will be the only SA's the bots will see. In your breakout strategy you have two attacks set. Now on map start you have two groups of bots that take off towards these two SA's only, once there these SA's connect to the other neighbors (SA's) throughout the map. Now say your breakout strategy is set to change on condition of owning three SA's (
aiStrategy.createConstantCondition threefriendlyareacond Crisp Equal Friendly 3) and in the strategy activated by this condition you have say 4 attacks. Now your going to see the bots break down smaller groups, or hey squads and each squad go after the SA's connected as neighbors to that SA. Heheh, I think I hear some gears grinding in all your beady little minds now as you began to think of all the possibilities here. Now it's by no means as simple as I made it sound, there is a lot of setup work and hours of trying this, testing then back to the drawing board stuff, but all kinds of things are totally do-able.
Quick edit, I found an image from one of Arc's tutorials. This shows a image of Aberdeen with a pathmap overlay. On it he has added the SA's with lines representing the neighbor relations and I think it is a very good visual and should help you understand this concept.
- SA's and neighbor connections schema, modified from the original image by Arc De Wrath. I changed it from .png to .jpq to meet file size upload limits.
I will start a new thread on this topic as soon as I can compose something.
I hope this all has been of some help.
L8trz,
Cajunwolf