| Description | This behavior has been happening since the 2.0-alpha-140112-1124, 1.3, and the newest builds of 3.0 I've tested in the past week.
Without giving too much backstory, I work on ZDoom Wars which heavily relies upon monsters attacking other monsters aggressively. Since the release of 1.3, the AI itself has behaved erratically to the point where monsters now don't even reciprocate attacks from other monsters, monsters will ignore other monsters without a player present, ignore players(you can literally walk into a sector covered with opposing enemies and only a few will attack the player... sometimes), and target another monster on the other side of the map ignoring an immediate threat attacking it. These issues have always been around to some degree every so often, but now they plague the game more than ever before. There have also been points where actor frames are completely off such as a monster moving backward will display the forward facing sprite, and sometimes even attack with their back to you.
I'm not entirely sure how this has affected other mods, but in ZDoom Wars, a mod that relies entirely on monster behavior, it becomes a lot more frustrating and unpredictable in regards to how a monster will react once spawned. A friend and I have tested this and in 1.2.2 we had two monsters spawned next to one another. Within 20 seconds the AI was so aggressive one monster will kill the other and barely be alive. On 1.3 and 2.0 now to have a monster kill another monster will take upwards of 1:30-2 minutes to kill the other target while behaving erratically against said target despite being directly next to it. By behaving erratically I mean completely wandering away, attacking once then rubbing up against the other monster, or even breaking target to attack the player even while being attacked by the opposing enemy. Instead of barely surviving, now they might walk out unscathed at times with full or near full health.
Another test we conducted was I stood at one end of a large map about 7000 map units away from the other player and we both used flying monsters to gauge how often they attack. In 1.2.2, if 10 monsters were summoned about 6-9 would attack aggressively with very little pause and pursue the player immediately. The same test conducted on 1.3 and 2.0 would result in 0-3 attacking once every 5-10 seconds, and most of the monsters would be flying away from the opposing player target into walls, in circles, backwards, or pursuit the player in a less aggressive manner rarely attacking at all.
I've got a few demos I've recorded of the example scenarios above from each respective revision demonstrating the AI. I'll edit them together and upload within the next few days so you guys can have an actual visual of what's happening. I'm going to wager that maybe the client movement buffer added in that 140112-1124 might be the culprit, but I also recall other bandwidth saving measures being added in as well. You guys would definitely have a better idea of what might have caused this than I would. If anything I'd like to at least bring attention to what's going on here so hopefully we can figure out the cause and solution where everybody comes out happy. |
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