Any plans to make this work for enemy weapons as well?

Originally posted by Menachem:

Any plans to make this work for enemy weapons as well?

As of now it's not planned - I want to initially test that everything works correctly for the Player first.

Adding the script to Combine and hooking it up with the weapon-shot event should work out-of-the-box, as the penetration doesn't really care from where it originated, as long as snatches the properties of the weapon that fired it (or if the data are set manually).

The only hiccup would be, that Combine generally try to fire at seen-enemies or at the last-seen position of enemies, though it should be probably possible to disable their occlusion-checking, or at the very least create a dynamic system where they'd predict where player moved depending on the last seen position and the direction of their movement.

What would probably be more of a pickle is figuring out when they are be able to shoot through walls like that, and if it was even desired - many players wouldn't like getting shot out of "nowhere", if it wasn't completely clear.

Originally posted by CementStairs:

Originally posted by Menachem:

Any
The only hiccup would be, that Combine generally try to fire at seen-enemies or at the last-seen position of enemies, though it should be probably possible to disable their occlusion-checking, or at the very least create a dynamic system where they'd predict where player moved depending on the last seen position and the direction of their movement.

What would probably be more of a pickle is figuring out when they are be able to shoot through walls like that, and if it was even desired - many players wouldn't like getting shot out of "nowhere", if it wasn't completely clear.

That would be pretty cool if you can actually get them to do that kind of stuff stated. But I doubt the suppressor should be given the same bullet penetration. As that would be probably TOO overpowered. Maybe like a light penetration, where they can only shoot through objects and wooden surfaces, but not like walls or thick objects and such.

I would LOVE to see that kind of feature work out. Would be nice if you can have it be compatiable with the Merciless Half Life Alyx mod. As that does modify their AI to be better and more deadly.

Originally posted by Ecologist N:

That would be pretty cool if you can actually get them to do that kind of stuff stated. But I doubt the suppressor should be given the same bullet penetration. As that would be probably TOO overpowered. Maybe like a light penetration, where they can only shoot through objects and wooden surfaces, but not like walls or thick objects and such.

I would LOVE to see that kind of feature work out. Would be nice if you can have it be compatiable with the Merciless Half Life Alyx mod. As that does modify their AI to be better and more deadly.

Hey,

the previous answer still stands. It should be possible practically out-of-the-box, but for the NPCs to fully utilise the feature, I would have to make some changes to the AI behaviour itself. What I'm worried about is that this could easily lead to breaking scripted sequences of many maps or to vastly altering their intended gameplay - in combat, many of them rely on this back-and-forth between the player attacking and hiding behind a cover; effectively removing the cover could sometimes just lead to the player having no way of defending themselves and thus frustrating gameplay.
So I rather leave this as a fully optional feature, that may be used by maps that are built with these mechanics in mind.

Originally posted by CementStairs:

Originally posted by Ecologist N:

Hey,

the previous answer still stands. It should be possible practically out-of-the-box, but for the NPCs to fully utilise the feature, I would have to make some changes to the AI behaviour itself. What I'm worried about is that this could easily lead to breaking scripted sequences of many maps or to vastly altering their intended gameplay - in combat, many of them rely on this back-and-forth between the player attacking and hiding behind a cover; effectively removing the cover could sometimes just lead to the player having no way of defending themselves and thus frustrating gameplay.
So I rather leave this as a fully optional feature, that may be used by maps that are built with these mechanics in mind.

Yeah, What I'm thinking about, is it being a seperate toggable "mod" in the alyx mod select thing. I'm not sure if it would actually break maps, as the merciless half life alyx mod doesnt break anything, even with all of the changes to the ai.

Originally posted by Ecologist N:

Yeah, What I'm thinking about, is it being a seperate toggable "mod" in the alyx mod select thing. I'm not sure if it would actually break maps, as the merciless half life alyx mod doesnt break anything, even with all of the changes to the ai.

Well, this is a bit of a different situation. Merciless mostly fine-tunes certain health/damage cfg values together with some modified behaviour in animgraph, but those kinds of changes don't have as much potential to disrupt the AI behaviour, as they're still relying on the standard base game behaviour of NPCs with some alternations.

In this case, the targeting system for Combine has to be vastly changed, so that they'd be able to bypass the visibility checks and predict where the player is currently located, so they could fire at them through the wall accurately (because normally they usually just suppress the last-seen-position). There are some ways to do it in the vanilla game, but if those don't prove to be reliable enough, then I'd have to rely on a custom system that'd override the standard behaviour - with all those solutions there's a high possibility it may change the intended scripting/gameplay of some maps (imagine if the enemy would not aggressively push towards the player as intended, but would instead stand their ground and fire from a distance, because already know where the player is - what if the mapper expected the NPCs to certainly move through some trigger along the way or attack a target with lower priority than the player, which breaks the scripting).
And even then, it's still a shot in the dark, because it depends on how each map is designed (since no map accounted for it). You might never encounter enough combat situations where this mechanic would be viable or on the contrary situations, where the enemy would constantly crush you due to it.
So to me it's much more sensible to create a map with it in mind, that utilises it to its fullest potential, rather than to build a more generalised (and so more limited) system that at the end of the day might be pointless or introduce even more problems.

Originally posted by CementStairs:

Originally posted by Ecologist N:

Yeah, What I'm thinking about, is it being a seperate toggable "mod" in the alyx mod select thing. I'm not sure if it would actually break maps, as the merciless half life alyx mod doesnt break anything, even with all of the changes to the ai.

Well, this is a bit of a different situation. Merciless mostly fine-tunes certain health/damage cfg values together with some modified behaviour in animgraph, but those kinds of changes don't have as much potential to disrupt the AI behaviour, as they're still relying on the standard base game behaviour of NPCs with some alternations.

In this case, the targeting system for Combine has to be vastly changed, so that they'd be able to bypass the visibility checks and predict where the player is currently located, so they could fire at them through the wall accurately (because normally they usually just suppress the last-seen-position). There are some ways to do it in the vanilla game, but if those don't prove to be reliable enough, then I'd have to rely on a custom system that'd override the standard behaviour - with all those solutions there's a high possibility it may change the intended scripting/gameplay of some maps (imagine if the enemy would not aggressively push towards the player as intended, but would instead stand their ground and fire from a distance, because already know where the player is - what if the mapper expected the NPCs to certainly move through some trigger along the way or attack a target with lower priority than the player, which breaks the scripting).
And even then, it's still a shot in the dark, because it depends on how each map is designed (since no map accounted for it). You might never encounter enough combat situations where this mechanic would be viable or on the contrary situations, where the enemy would constantly crush you due to it.
So to me it's much more sensible to create a map with it in mind, that utilises it to its fullest, rather than to build a more generalised (and so more limited) system that at the end of the day might be pointless or introduce even more problems.

I mean, you could just give them the bullet physics and not even change the AI. But that would kinda be boring. I've seen combine do this thing where they cant see the player through see through ballistic windows. You can probably get the AI to actually see said windows or something Dont know.