There were two bugs that kept this from working until now:
1) The destination goal point was calculated to take the ship right through the center of danger. Flipping the vector now takes the ship away from danger as intended.
2) The original AI code did not turn the ship at all. The new code turns the ship toward its goal point.
The fixed behavior is tied to the new `$fix keep-safe-distance:` flag.
* Add AI to Fix Negative Turret Ammo
Previously, turrets with ammo would end up firing one extra shot, resulting in a -1 ammo.
This was because of the check `ammo[bank_to_fire] >= 0`, in `aiturret.cpp`. This PR adds an AI flag to have the turret only fire if the ammo is greater than 0 (`ammo[bank_to_fire] > 0`), as opposed to greater than or equal to 0.
Tested and the flag fix works as expected.
* feedback
* set to on for target 22
1) Several AI profiles options were getting reset on every iteration through the loop. They should only be reset when the profile is initially created.
2) Keeping track of AI hits on the player ship was added by Sushi in 9246a2f74d and needs to be guarded by a flag. This flag has been enabled for mods that set the required FSO version.
This PR provides modders with additional options to alter countermeasure values. Previously, countermeasures had a fixed, hardcoded fire wait time of 333 milliseconds, regardless of what `$Fire Wait:` was specified. Also, the AI would wait a fixed delay between firing of failed countermeasure launches and successful countermeasure launches. For successful launches the AI would double the fire wait. Also, Friendly ships would only use a fixed constant value for countermeasure firing chance, and not the value based on their class specific AI profile.
This PR exposes those values with the following options:
• Add main AI table flag: `Friendly Ships Use AI Profile Countermeasures Firing Chance`. This will allow Friendly ships to use their AI class profile countermeasure firing chance instead of the default fixed value from main AI table.
• Add value in CM section of weapons table: Countermeasures use fire wait time `+Use Fire Wait`. This is a boolean that allows the countermeasure’s fire wait to actually use what is specified in the `$Fire Wait:` section of that weapon.
• Add value in CM section weapons table: `+Fail Delay Equals Fire Wait`. The delay between failed countermeasure launches is set to use the fire wait value.
• Add value in CM section weapons table: `+Successful Launch Delay Multiplier`. This allows modders to set the value that is multiplied to fire wait for successful countermeasure launches.
As astuetly determined by @Baezon `the speed differential for retail cap ships is caused by 'ships with no shields can manage ETS', being part of the bugfixes with target version`. This PR adds two flags per Discord suggestion, one for all ships and one for only small ships.
Using the `No_shields` flag for ships is common usage in multiple mods, and as it turns out ships with that flag set will not have the AI manage ETS values due to an early return in the `ai_manage_ets` function. This PR adds an AI flag to allow ships with no shields to manage ETS regarding weapons and engines. This flag was tested and works as expected.
Previously, the default distance for determining if a ship had finished a point in a model path was only 5. This worked fine for ships with low damp or no Newtonian physics. However, it did not work well with ships that use higher damps or Newtonian physics, becuase those ships contiunatlly overshoot that 5 meter distance and get stuck flying in a large circle trying to reach that point. This fix allows modders to set an AI flag to specify that the path distance check uses a larger value of 775 for points that are not the last point in the path. If desired I can add a game settings option that allows modders to set this value.
This adds an ai_profiles flag that checks comm systems for non-player ships. If their comm system is damaged, they will not send messages and you will not be able to issue squadmsg orders.
See also:
http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=1947
By enabling the "$Use Actual Primary Range:" profile flag (which can also be set on a per-AI-class basis), the code to determine if the AI should fire its primary weapons will not only perform its current "range based on speed of weapon and target" calculation, but it will also compute the weapon's actual range and not fire if the target is outside of it.
By making parse_ai_profiles_tbl() actually check the return value of skip_to_start_of_string_either() (and break if the appropriate characters aren't found), AI profile tables should no longer keep parsing past the end of the file and into invalid memory, until they either find an "#End" in memory somewhere or just plain crash.
As a pleasant bonus, a missing "#End" should now generate an appropriate error message.
EatThePath