47 replies to this topic

[thudo]

The Dawn of Skirmish WA Advanced AI Mod v1.8 is here!

Download v1.8!

**ATTENTION**
This is meant for Dawn of War WINTER ASSAULT ONLY! No other versions will work as it will error out if you try to run on anything other than the expansion!

Meet the Cast:
Thudo (Thudmeizer)..>> Team Lead/Coder/Gfx/Bonafied Cheerleader
ArkhanTheBlack......>> Lead Coder/Scripter
LarkinVB............>> Lead Coder/Scripter/Beta Tester
Corsix..............>> Coder
Slash...............>> Beta Tester
FinalDeath..........>> Beta Tester
Zenoth..............>> Beta Tester
QuietDeath..........>> Beta Tester
JBird...............>> Beta Tester
Catachan............>> Beta Tester

Introduction
============
Prepare for a more enhanced Dawn Of War/Winter Assault Skirmish Experience!

This project started after the release of Dawn Of War with the intent to bring to the global DoW community a more intense and satisfying AI opponent on the field of war. We hope you will agree that has been achieved with the understanding more is to be done in the future. Our work continues to evolve and in the coming months will make current efforts pale in comparison. However, you have to start somewhere and hot damn what a jumpstart!

Its been a slice from start to, well, continuing! We're so looking forward to enhancing the AI even further in the coming months!

A Personal Thanks
=================
At this time I would like to personally thank all the participating members of the team:

ArkhanTheBlack, LarkinVB, Excedrin, and Corsix, as well as our beta testers (all who keep our work "in-perspective" and "on-track" with our ultimate goals of achieving the most competitive DoW AI opponent we can create!).

Its through your dedication, patience, and technical expertise that allowed the work to commence and prosper. Without you fellers, there'd be a pittence of work compared to the greatness this project has become. We've come a long way and do sincerely hope to continue our expert correspondance into the future of the product.

Disclaimer
==========
This is to acknowledge that we take no personal responsibility for any hardware damage or data corruption brought forth by the use or installation of this DoW modification. As used, this modification works "as is" and has been thoroughly tested and should not cause any major problems. In the event, however, that something serious does occur, it is up to the user(s) of their computer(s) to make appropriate backups before any attempt is made to install the following DoW modification. Use at your own risk.

Whats In The Package?
====================
o Main Installation Package containing the Enhanced DoW AI scripts (contains ONLY those .ai files that our team altered)
o Dawn Of Skirmish WA v1.8 README.txt (what your reading)
o *NEW* Doc folder containing information how to add your own faction to the AI project.

Installation
============
Piece of Cake! Run the executable and it will extract to where your <installed Dawn Of War folder> is.

Once installed, run the newly placed shortcut on your desktop "Dawn Of Skirmish WA v1.8" or from StartMenu/Programs/"Dawn Of War Skirmish AI Mod". You will know if the modification is running when on the top-left section of the Dawn Of War Main Menu it will display: Dawn Of Skirmish v1.75.

To uninstall this modification, go back to StartMenu/Programs/"Dawn Of War WA Skirmish AI Mod" and choose "Remove Dawn Of Skirmish AI Mod" to remove the modification from Dawn Of War.

**NOTE**

This version of the AI mod will NOT work on the original versions of Dawn of War (v1.40) so PLEASE update to the Winter Assault expansion! We have not fully tested this under the older v1.40 game-code so we don't support it currently.

v1.8 Changes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
o v1.50 certified - works with latest game code!
o New AI control panel (allows for the adjustment of various settings for each difficulty (Exe + Readme in AI folder)
o Improved early harassing
o Improved allied support
o Improved capturing behaviour
o Improved AI attack and defense
o Powerful AI's can split their forces to support allies

Thanks to everyone on the team for you incredibly hard work getting this compatible with all the major balance changes in WinterAssault and thanks to you, the community, for your patience!

I'll try to have more links up but use the one above for now!

Now DAMN IT go get owned!

[Slash]

want me to upload this to dow files? Im a staffer there for uploading stuff ^^

[Blodo]

I have just downloaded and tried it and I must say: this AI is a great improvement over the vanilla one. You guys deserve a bucket of praise.

This coming from someone who just bought WA, but was a long time DoW player.

[thudo]

Thanks Slash! Please do so - I forgot to ask Tempest..

Blodo - thanks for the Kudos! The AI devs here REALLY appreciate it as we're getting alot of congrads from the community. However.. keep watching as when mid-Sept hits with the 2nd official expansion, the Skirmish AI may just realize a new revolution!

[Zenoth]

Thudo, I'd like to know if the hero attachment code was revised by either you, Arkhan or Larkin for this release ?

I haven't seen any mention concerning the subject in the change log for 1.8 Final, nor in 1.8 Beta 8's. I was wondering if anything about it was done between the final Beta release, and the actual final version available here in this thread.

I'm asking this because I thought that the hero attachment could sometimes be "lacking" in certain situations (not happening everytime, it was actually rare, but was noticeable), and I mentioned it in my last report actually (a Chaos Lord skulking around alone in early game and suiciding to one of my LP's bullets).

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Thudo, I'd like to know if the hero attachment code was revised by either you, Arkhan or Larkin for this release ?

Yes, I reduced the required squad cost for attachments to 150.

[Zenoth]

Ah ! Ok thanks Arkhan !

[Orlock519]

First off I want to say: thank you! I really love the AI Mod, because it just whoops me most of the time hehe.

Now, I loved 1.75 and was really looking forward to AI Mod 1.8 with the release of 1.5, but I have run into a problem. When I try to play a skirmish with 1.8 running the game is very choppy/jumpy. It moves slow, rugged and choopy/jumpy. The units and the camera both. I can play WA without 1.8 fine and I even re-installed 1.75 and it ran fine. I do not know what it is happening.

I just thought I would let you know what problem I have encountered and see if you maybe you had an idea on what I could do and to just make you aware of this since I did not see a post on here, or on the Relic Mod forums.

I have tried unistalling and reinstalling 1.8 and that did not work. I tried lowering all my settings to Low (I play with everything on High just fine) and still had the choppiness. WA runs fine when I deactivate 1.8, or play using 1.75. Installation was fine and it loads just like it always has, but when I go to play in 1.8 it just runs very chopp/jumpy. I hope I can get this resolved, because I really want to play using 1.8.

Anyways! I hope I posted this in the right place. Thanks again!

Edited by Orlock519, 11 July 2006 - 01:08 AM.

[thudo]

Hrrmmm.. Performance issue? Anyone else? I have never seen a slowdown due to any builds coming to the v1.8 public release. Did you go back to 1.75 and see if it runs better/faster? Then go up to 1.8 and immediately see the slowdown? Just wondering..

[ArkhanTheBlack]

In some betas 1.8 had performance problems, but the release version should be even faster than 1.75. When do you recognize the performance hit? Immediately at the start, or only if the game lasts a while with several big armies in play? Personally I only notice the new 1.5 lag while playing online, but I don't have problems with the AI performance at the moment.

Anyone having the same problems?!?

[Zenoth]

That's interesting ...

I myself sometimes also notice a performance issue in late games. It runs smooth as ever right at the start, and it slowly but surely decreases over time, of course when armies become bigger, and even more so when vehicles arrive on the battlefield.

Personally, I have seen such performance decrease "over time" especially (but not only) when playing with and/or against two or more Ork factions. The Orks are technically the faction in WH40K that can produce to biggest amount of infantry. So logically, the more that's going on-screen and the slower the performance will be. But just as Orlock519 says, decreasing the in-game graphics settings doesn't really help in this particular case. I first thought that it was just me, my system, but it seems not.

I have also noticed that when it happens, it does in maps with narrow passages for vehicles. It rarely occurs in bigger, open-ended maps where vehicles don't have much path-finding calculations to do to reach point B. For example, city maps (ruins, buildings in most places, small streets for navigation, etc) are affected by the issue ... or shall I rather say that the issue affects city-like maps. Or any maps that offers small maneuvering space for vehicles mostly, but I'd also say for infantry to some extent. Imperial Guard's Ogrins, and Chaos' Possesed troops can take a lot of space to move when their squad is full.

Well, technically I believe that it might not be universally caused by DoS A.I itself. Take the maps, their layouts, into consideration, and you'll see that at least the performance issue whe are talking about here isn't that noticeable in some, but is constantly present especially in late games in others.

I think that path-finding plays a big role here, if not the only one, being the cause of the performance hit.

At least in my case though.

[thudo]

Any PC RTS will slowdown IF the AI gets its units bottlenecked in tight corners since the AI is trying to compute how to get each of those units out of the mess its in. If it cannot and a large chunk of its units are "sandwitched" then yep you'll get massive slowdown. Regrettably no PC RTS AI has the ability to avoid this since it does not comprehend what units are causing the bottleneck.

So watch maps wth tight corridors or mountain passes..

[Zenoth]

I wonder though ... was it ever confirmed or not if WH40K's engine can support Dual-Core CPU's ? I presume not, since that engine was built when Dual-Core CPU's were not available yet. Perhaps through patches Relic made a few optimizations though, but nothing that can prevent path-finding issues indeed.

If Dual-Core CPU's were effectively supported, it would certainly help. Maybe not by a large extent, but it would. I don't know how many CPU cycles can path-finding take in late games, but it must be a lot, because believe me, when the issue is present, it is very, very noticeable, and even annoying.

Edited by Zenoth, 11 July 2006 - 07:08 PM.

[thudo]

Yeaaa.. very VERY few PC games support Dual-Core. Thats a little more down the road although with Intel's uber-amazing Conroe coming in 1-2 weeks things will likely be changing for the better!

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Slow down in bigger battles has a very good reason. Every unit checks a small area around its position for threats and support. Since GetThreatAtPos is a bit buggy, I had to replace it with a better one. But manual replacements are normally slower since they are scripted in LUA and not hardcoded C++ stuff.
If this gets really a problem we might have to do some changes for the next version. Though I haven't planned a new version before DC is released.
Would be good to get some more feedback about how serious this issue is. At least my 3,2 Ghz AMD64 seems to handle the end game armies of 6 players quiet good.

[Finaldeath]

I'll test it out on my mid-range (for DOW I think) machine, thing is I go for performance anyway, but did notice in a few of the betas, a bit of slowdown.

You could always just not do threat analysis (and other things) *all* the time, and make it happen only some of the time, or is delayed to be every other timeframe or something

[thudo]

Again.. same here.. I have a P2.8 OCed to 3.1, 1gb PC3200 Oc'ed, ATI X800XT AGP8x OCed to 526/526 (stock is 499/499) + running DoW:WA on a SATA1 drive. Game runs @ 1600x1200xMax details but no AA or AF. This system runs it beautifully except in 6-8 player matches where there is an "apocalyptic" amount of shiet running.

[Slash]

thud sorry i havnt got the mod on dowfiles yet, ive been away from home >_> but i will promise you that it will be uploaded on DoWfiles sooner or later!

Edited by Slash, 12 July 2006 - 02:40 AM.

[thudo]

Thanks Slash... yeaahh I need to find a direct way to contact the admins there. Always have this prob.

[Slash]

done it is now on dow files:

link >>>> http://dawnofwar.fil...com/file/;66139