Miner A.I.

[Puppetbones]

Miner A.I. need some love. I'm not asking them to be as good as a human, because the fact that they aren't is an interesting part of the game, but I would consider the following 5 things bugs, not A.I. limitations:

1. If miners are upgraded to be capable of moving while mining, the A.I. bump into asteroids while mining them, eventually crashing the ship.

2. A.I.'s launch miners from BC even if there is danger all around. Immediately upon launching, they turn around and ram the BC waiting for their timer to end so they can redock. Sometimes they lose the ship before being able to redock. And if they do manage to redock, guess what they do: immediately launch right back out into space and do it all over again. In fact, even if they die they will just take another miner and crash that one too. All you have to do is spam kinetics on the enemy BC and they lose all of their miners.

3. Sometimes the miners fly around bumping into asteroids without mining anything. Usually when this happens the top check box for that A.I. in the A.I. console is unchecked. Rechecking it and issuing an order often fixes it, only to have it happen again 10 seconds later.

4. Sometimes A.I. miners just stop and do absolutely nothing. In this case, usually everything is checked in the A.I. console and issuing an order fixes it. It might be linked to #3 though.

5. It's frustrating to pull the BC alongside a large cluster of asteroids and watch the A.I. all launch out of the side with no asteroids and journey half way across the map to find some. I would suggest that they check which side has more nearby asteroids before launching. If it's too hard to program them to actually get into a hangar console on the correct side, I would be fine with them being able to launch out of either side no matter what hangar console they are in (so they could launch right side out of left hangar console). Hell, they even launch out the Construction Console sometimes so I don't see any problem with them using the wrong side of the hangar. Another little thing I noticed is that A.I. miners will move closer to an asteroid than they need to before stopping to mine it. The range of the mining laser is long enough to mine an asteroid on the other side of a BC, but since the asteroid detection radius of the A.I. is smaller it will not detect asteroids on the other side of the BC that are within mining range. Fixing that might also help. And another solution might be that when there are no asteroids within range of the miner, it goes to the nearest asteroid on the minimap instead of just moving in whatever direction it happens to be facing. There is a built in filter in the Editor for discovered units only, so you could make it not cheat by going to asteroids that have not been discovered yet, but rather, to the nearest discovered one.

I will dig up replays if requested.

[Siretu]

I did fix a bug related to the check all button and miners some time ago. Are you sure the problem is still there?

I'll look into the other issues.

[slapshot]

would also be nice to have the miners not crash into asteroids that they are not assigned to mine, i.e. if they are set to mine red and yellow, and there is a blue field.. not crash into all the blue asteroids

[Puppetbones]

I did fix a bug related to the check all button and miners some time ago. Are you sure the problem is still there?

Pretty sure. Watch this replay.

Important parts:
7:00 - Drone 1 quits mining, but continues moving.
20:20 - I noticed boxes unchecked in AI console.
21:00 - Player 6 (not Drone 6) stops mining and moving.
24:20 - I go to AI console and notice boxes unchecked.
25:00(ish) - Drone 1 stops mining, continues moving.

[slapshot]

7:00 - Drone 1 quits mining, but continues moving.
25:00(ish) - Drone 1 stops mining, continues moving.

Drone 1 seems to have this issue more often than the others, possibly due to it being the default selected drone - the work-around has been to assign drone 1 to something other than mining, i.e. refining instead

[Puppetbones]

Drone 1 seems to have this issue more often than the others

Well that should help Siretu find the issue.

[Siretu]

So I looked into the issue and used the "Take Command" feature and debug commands to further debug the issue. The drone mining problems at 7:00 seems to be unrelated to the checkboxes.

In fact it seems to be related to the miner being stuck in a state where it's trying to mine where but cant mine because it's moving. I've changed the mining state to use cut engines each tick to make it stop properly and avoid it getting stuck in a state of bumping into asteroids.

I'll keep looking into the checkbox issue later.

[Puppetbones]

Oh okay thanks for fixing.

And you probably know this but incase you don't:
An odd thing about checkboxes is that if you check or uncheck a checkbox via a trigger, it appears it treats it as if a player actually clicked it. That is; it will fire the "Player uses dialog item" event.

[Siretu]

Yep, had some trouble with that previously. It should be handled properly.