This screenshot says it all, I think:

Needless to say, I didn't win that one, heh. I did finally find a counter to the Browncoats for the Dummies, and they can win sometimes... if you're really good at Rambo. I think I'm going to give their boss a Repeater or buff their energy gun a bit, though; the Dummies have very little that can stop Browncoat Heavies atm.

Hopefully! I don't know what I'm talking about. :p

Strange, when I install your mod, I get a pink screen and nothing else. I tried the game without your mod and it works perfectly !

IIRC, that's a problem with your resolution.

Make sure that you've installed 1.03; IIRC, I accidentally left settings.ini in one of the builds. So check your resolution settings in there.

Dummy balance is getting fine-tuned; I've been playing vs. 3 Browncoats for a bit, and have only survived on the one map where the AI can't pathfind worth a darn.

The Blaster is now ammo-less and has a slightly better range, making it the cheap choice for anti-armor jobs. The Dummy Turret's getting a much-needed change in actor height, so that deploying it anywhere but a nice neat base isn't a joke, and it's firing Repeater rounds so that it's a threat to everybody.

Dunno what I'm doing with the Annihilator yet, but it obviously can't stay the way it is. It finally hurts stuff but it's basically worthless because of the self-gibbing nature of the overcharge. It'd be more useful if it was basically like the Laser Rifle, just more dangerous and with a much lower rate of fire.

That leads to another question for everybody to ponder: sure, those "cave" and "mountain" maps are neat-looking, but gameplay-wise, they leave a lot to be desired. Should they get replaced with maps that feature fewer hills? Or should I just encourage the AI to drop more guys directly over your Brain if they're the attackers, so that they might have a chance to eventually pathfind to your location? Not sure how to address this issue, basically; but it's a fundamental problem with the core gameplay atm.

Improve their terrain traversability, or give them diggers and teach them how to use them, or both.

Well, about the only thing that can improve their terrain performance is making the jetpacks take them straight up instead of forward and up. The AI obviously expects to go up most of the time, not slam up against the same cliff it's been slamming against for the last few minutes.

That, or just adding more impulse force or time, so that the AI can use longer bursts and actually get over stuff when it needs to. Needless to say, that's going to create issues for human players.

What we see the characters do a lot is sit there up against holes they could traverse if they just went straight up and then tried flying to the side or used longer bursts. However, the pathfinder is often pathing them to places that don't make any sense from a human POV. I can understand why that's a very hard problem to solve.

It'd be a lot easier to simply make the AI self-gib their troops if they're stuck and hand the AI their money back so that they can try dropping closer to your Brain, but I'll take a look at the HumanAI code, lengthen their bursts and tweak impulse forces up a wee bit; that might solve the typical cases, if not the really messy problems like Dvorak Caves.

It works much better now ! Thanks !

OK, just tested giving the jets twice the impulse and particles per burst. No other major changes.

Result? The AI gets hosed a lot less on Dvorak Caves, because it stays high enough when jumping across the chasms. It's actually able to land on that ledge in the base, which it consistently flubbed before. It's also getting out of holes more reliably.

That said, this change basically makes it quite possible for players to fly across the entire battlefield with careful use of jet time. Not sure if that's a feature or not... but it certainly fixed some of the bigger mobility hassles and makes the AI a lot less useless on that special case.

You could try doing it in lua instead, adding force (or vel if you're lazy) based on the torso's rotangle and offset to the location of the jetpack to the ai when it's jetpacking but not adding it for human players. I imagine this'd be a lot harder to balance though.

Also want to throw in that this whole mod sounds amazing, when I stop being so busy (I haven't touched CC or any other game in a few days because of lack of more than 15 minutes to string together) I'll check it out and give you a proper opinion.

Yeah, the AI Lua's actually playing with velocity some to get the Dropships and stuff to the targets, and when it's trying to figure out whether to jump or not it's evaluating all of that in Lua; there's a fair amount of stuff I can mess with there. I actually had to write a fix for the Rocklet AI for 1.04 (which should be soonish) because with the motion controller script it wasn't quite able to settle down and release passengers on non-flat surfaces. I got that under control though.

I'd like to avoid having AI scripts that are all uniquely tuned for each character's motion, though. It's bad enough that they all have unique motion control scripts that have to get tuned (although that's certainly worth it).

I think probably the easiest fix, in terms of control, is going to be to do it through jetpack thrusts; a lot of the characters all share the same jetpacks, but have different masses; if I matched up their performance better (heck, just gave them all identical masses, but different jetpack profiles) then I could probably arrive at a good result.

It looks like the AI does best when jetpacks give a pretty strong burst thrust, because it likes using peak thrust power instead of the slow burns, but it doesn't handle the issue of deliberately going straight up and burning all the fuel to get maximum upwards velocity, then using short bursts as your fuel returns to "glide", like humans can. I don't know if I can fix that via code or not, but I'll take a look.

It may be that for anything but jump-only jetpacks, simply removing the fuel requirement entirely might be a good solution for the AI; I don't think Lua's allowed to refuel jetpacks but I'll look at that, because it might fix things for the AI.

Oh my, Xenoargh you've made a full mod. I'll definitely raise a hand to test it. Plus it will be nice what all your in-depth observations produced.

I don't think you can refuel jetpacks via lua, at least I've noticed nothing about it. But then again, I mostly do scenes.
As for adding force, you don't have to do it individually just use the actor's mass in the amount of force added:

You'd have to use the rot angle of the torso to get the proper offset of the pack, unless there's an easier way to do it (I recall seeing an offset checking function for attachables maybe) but it should work fine once you tune it up properly. Of course if you don't want a direct relationship like that and want to be able to vary how much more effective some jetpacks are when used by the ai it'd be more difficult but hopefully you can just rely on setting the jetpack strength in ini.

I also want to add that I'm impressed by your actually fiddling with actor's AIs and such, Abdul's stuff is complicated and confusing and I've stayed far away from it
And that's funny, I always found the rocklet easy to fly because it was so small and light that any thrust direction would significantly impact its velocity (when spammed).

I noticed a few problems. First, the coalition load out with the mini gun and flak cannon spawns three guys but the third is unequipped, not sure if this is intentional. Second, the bombs seem to land on the defenders brain - I'd have thought it would make more sense to drop them at the site the attacker is landing at. Third, which links to the second sort of is that on Mt. Imdunt, the bombs drop on top of the base and kill the brain before the opponent even lands. Fourth and final is that after an actor dies it sometimes keeps sliding over terrain and through bases.

@Bad Boy: I'll look at that. I'm leaning towards giving them a boost directly up and cut their X velocity if their control status == up and not under human control, I think that will be easiest and probably can be nearly standard for everybody.

Still working on 1.04; basically I did a lot of work on the Dummies to make them a little more able to dish out pain and fix weapons that didn't have much of a use case.

Nope, it's a bug and it's fixed. Mixed the wrong case in a name

They actually land anywhere, at random, within 1000 pixels to either side of the attacking brain. That feature really needs more work; right now it's just a simplistic way to give the attacking team some way to counter-act the severe disadvantages they start with. In the future, expect the bombs to get better at killing stuff and maybe have a little more variety; it'd be cool if the AI, if it really had a lot of money, could use some tank-killing bombs or even bunker penetrators, but it'd be hard to balance, given that fortresses never ever reset, no matter how much money you spend.

On that map, if the player that owns it hasn't invested in a fortress, they're pretty well hosed, yup. Not a bug, per se, just a quirk of the map.

They've always done that weird ragdoll-forever stuff occasionally. It's an engine bug; I agree that it shouldn't ever ragdoll that long, but sometimes they do and AIs still attack them until they're fully gibbed. I don't know if there's a fix for that one but I'll look at it; maybe forcing them to gib fully if dead is the only fix.