* One fix and one enhancement to AI shield behavior
This PR adds one fix and one enhancement to AI shield behavior.
1) Fix: Testing, especially in FotG, revealed an edge-case bug with shield management where the AI will not direct shield energy to a quadrant if it was hit when that quadrant was down. In other words, if a shield quadrant is knocked down to 0 and continues to be shot the AI will not realize it needs to direct energy to that quadrant. This is because `quadrant` is set to -1 if a shield segment is down. This ensures that the resulting effects and damage calculations properly ignore that quadrant downstream, but it also results in `aip->last_hit_quadrant` being set to -1. This PR adds a fix to properly record which shield was actually hit, so that the AI knows to direct energy to that quadrant.
2) Enhancement: In combat situations with fire coming from many directions, it is good practice to keep shields equalized, so this PR adds a flag for the AI to always attempt to balance shields, even if it is being fired upon (instead of the current behavior to always direct energy to the hit shield quadrant).
Both flags are tested and work as expected.
* fix copy paste
* rename to avoid previous confusion
* also make as ai class flag
Two updates to the energy transfer system.
1. Previously, for fighters missing a system (e.g. shields), the energy would be treated as if all energy from that system was routed to the other systems. So, for example, a fighter's typical speed would be faster without shields than with shields. A new AI profile flag now treats the other systems as if the energy had not been transferred.
2. At some point in development, Volition intended the `$Power Output` ships.tbl field to affect ETS. A new AI profile flag now treats the power output as a factor of energy applied to energy systems.
* Unify AI Usage of Shield Manage Delay
`$AI Shield Manage Delay:` can be set in the AI profiles, but also set for AI specific classes. Currently, The values set for the specific AI class are only used `if (iff_x_attacks_y(Player_ship->team, Ships[objp->instance].team))`, otherwise the values in the AI profile are used.
Being able to have the shield delay work in a unified way according to the AI class values is very useful, especially for friendly wingmen that you want have different shield manage delays.
This PR adds a AI profiles flag to unify Shield Manage Delay behavior, so that it always works in the same way regardless of AI team conditions.
* cleanup unifying behavior along with CM firing chance
* restore what sushi had for now
* initial version of default_settings.tbl
* Add a way to change player detail level defaults and implement a couple more options to detail_settings.tbl
* support the rest of 2d.cpp options
* Allow enforcing options to a specific value
* modernize detail defaults, levels, and values
* Fix parsing issue and remove lambda capture by reference
* fix print
* clang
* More efficient +Enforce parsing
* cleanup
* typo
* don't negate this
* error_display
* clarify language between presets, levels, and values
* add default case
* small fix
* use a map to minimize string lookups
* Allow Modders to Tune Strafing
Many mods change ship velocities and damp values, but this commonly leads to poor behaviors attacking large ships within strafe mode (which is the main method for attacking big ships in a sustained way). As an example, FotG has damp and velocity values that are higher than base FS, thus the defined strafe values result in behavior where fighters never can complete a sustained firing pass against a large ship unless they are sitting and parking (which does not fit our goals to match the movie).
The values for dictating how strafe behavior occurs are easily editable by changing some key values, which this PR exposes to modders. Furthermore, mods may give large ships very long range weapons, so being able to set how far away a ship should do a strafe run begins is very valuable.
In testing it was very easy to get desired behavior of having AI do long sustained strafing runs. I estimate other mods will likely be able to leverage these values to tune strafing behavior.
I did numerous tests and evaluations finding the best balance of values to expose. I would be happy to discuss these changes in detail too, as I know this exposes a number of values.
* clang
* incorporate feedback
The FreeSpace AI includes behavior to run away from shockwaves to try to avoid explosion damage. This is implemented for both ships and missiles, although the missile implementation has been buggy ever since retail. There are several issues:
1. The AI attempts to evade a weapon immediately upon launch. Many missiles have a period of free flight before they start homing on their target. During the free flight period, the homing position is not set. Consequently, the AI will not know the position to avoid and will make assumptions.
2. The AI assumes the shockwave-producing weapon will detonate at the center of the ship it is targeting, although missiles detonate on the surface. A capital ship is likely to be significantly larger than the weapon's blast radius, leading the AI to believe the detonation will be much farther away than it actually is.
3. When avoiding ship shockwaves, the `shockwave_object` field is not cleared when avoiding is complete. This can result in stale references (though not crashes, due to object type checks), causing AI to not avoid future explosions in certain cases.
4. When avoiding ship shockwaves, the code does not check the correct ship for the amount of damage caused by the shockwave.
All of these issues are now fixed. Since this is a change in AI behavior, these fixes are tied to a new AI profiles flag.
The somewhat modern AI flag for `Require_exact_los` is extremely useful in multiple different situations, for example making large capital ship weapons not fire into friendly surrounding ships on accident. When the feature was added, the `check_los` function was provided with a default value of `10.0` meters for minimum radius detection. This PR exposes that value to modders so they can set it to a reasonable value depending on the ship sizes of their specific needs. And as a note, the los value just uses a simple numerical comparison check, so the los detection could be set to a negative value with no consequence (hence why error messages were not added, though if folks would like I can certainly add them).
The three functions `physics_apply_whack`, `physics_apply_shock`, and `physics_collide_whack` limited speed after the physics had been applied, but they limited absolute speed, not the speed due to the physics. This modifies the process to limit the change in speed. It also adds an AI profiles flag to disable the limit if desired.
This also tweaks the three functions (by editing comments and moving lines) to be more consistent, since all three are doing very similar calculations near the end.
* Expose Collision Rotation Factor to Players
Previously, there were hardcoded checks in place to make players have 0 rotational effects when colliding with another ship. This PR adds a new value, "+Player Multiplier for Rotation Factor:" that allows modders to have players experience rotational effects from collisions. Also performed some cleanup of the light and heavy collisional rotational calculations by removing older if-blocks following useful recommendation from Asteroth.
Tested and works as expected.
* make rot_fac_multiplier_ply_collisions into global value
* update name to better match with ships table
* restore repeated comments to help with separation
The ai_profiles.tbl options can already be read in any order, so it is modder-friendly to extend this capability to game_settings.tbl as well. This also updates the "unrecognized parameter" log statement to indicate the filename.
Note that this commit should be viewed while ignoring whitespace changes.
* Add AI Flag to `align to target when guarding stationary ship`
When a ship is ordered to guard another ship that is stationary and not incredibly large, the AI will fly to a position then turn and face away from the targeted ship. This behavior is not ideal in various scenarios, including both blockade style formations and overall visuals.
The PR adds a flag that tells the AI to align to the target ship it is guarding once the AI has reached it's guarding position in this situation, which allows all the guarding ships to have the same orientation and look much better and work better for directional defenses.
Tested and works as expected. Also changed some `NULL` to `nullptr` in this function for cleanup.
* remove duplicate brackets
This option was misleadingly named when originally introduced, so give it a more sensible name. The old name is still accepted for backwards compatibility.
Add "tactical" versions of disable and disarm goals which only perform the specific task without implying anything else. The target ship is not protected and attack goals are not cleared from other ships.
There is also a new AI profiles flag to make this the default hud squad message command instead of the classic disable/disarm.
This was the bug found recently that was thought to be related to #2157. It turns out that ships will manage ETS even if they are playing dead, which caused a ship to accelerate during a ship-maneuver as it directed more power to engines. So this PR adds a "$ships playing dead don't manage ETS:" flag to control this behavior. Tested and works.
This also capitalizes two flags that did not have an initial capital letter.
This adds an AI profiles flag that filters autoscaling so that only the index and number of autoscaled classes are considered, not the index and number of all AI classes.
Fixes#4516.
* Add AI flag to support ai bay arrivals > 10 seconds
Currently, if an AI ship is emerging from a bay path, the AI will stop following that path after only 10 seconds (and some distance away from the starting point). This results in AI breaking off a path early if a bay arrival path is long and/or uses a slow bay arrive multipliers. For bays that require the ship to follow the exact path this results in AI that then run into the parent ship and each other.
This PR adds a flag which disables that 10 second timeout. Also, in my tests having a flag to disable works best, as opposed to setting a max time (which is hard to calculate with varying ship speeds and varying bay path lengths).
PR is tested and works as expected.
* fix spelling
* Fix Remove-Order not working for Play Dead Orders
Play-dead orders set a special case of the ai mode (AIM_PLAY_DEAD), which had special handling to return early in the AI frame function. Remove-order does not change the ai mode though, and thus even when a play-dead order was removed the `AIM_PLAY_DEAD' remained, which would continually trigger an early out in AI frame, which in turn would make turrets not fire on ships, even when the play-dead order was removed. No other orders had this early return, which is why remove order works for them.
This PR accounts for that special handling case. There also seemed to be an extra cleanup line for rearm and repair, so this was added right after that step.
Tested and works as expected.
* make fix flag enabled
* appease clang
The original implementation of `ai_good_time_to_rearm` did not revert to being a "bad" time to rearm when the time was up. This fixes that and adds an AI profiles flag to toggle it.
Also converts `ai_rearm_timestamp` to use the new TIMESTAMP type.
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.
wookieejedi