Goal: Stop NPC Enemies 'cheating' to follow player
-
I’ve found that ships that are not in the player’s view seem to have different behavior than those that the player can see. My goal is to force enemy NPC’s to be correctly limited by their ships’ capabilities when chasing the player (not in formation, etc) This seems to me to be an AI processing issue.
Case in point: when the player’s camera is pointed away from NPC ships, those ships stay within weapons range, even when player should be traveling faster (via engine kill and a superior thruster speed than the NPCs). However, the instant the following ships are looked at with a camera (Rear View, Turret, or by turning the ship), the NPCs fall away.
This behavior also appears for me when entering tradelanes: NPC ships show up in the contact list at a certain distance behind the player ship, but when looking back, they fall away.
It seems to me that this is tied to the AI for following or trailing, but I’m unsure. The second instance, in tradelanes, suggests that AI operates differently when the player can’t see the NPC.
Looking through [[Limit Breaking 101]], I see that TrailOP behavior can be replaced with FollowOP behavior, but I’m not confident that it will solve the issue, since ships in tradelanes, who should not be attempting to follow the player, exhibit similar behavior.
Am I missing something? Is there already a ‘fix’ for this, or knowledge that it’s either possible or impossible?
Thanks.
