[MOD 0.14] AAI Programmable Vehicles

Sperwer · Post by **Sperwer** » Tue May 09, 2017 9:45 am

Ever moved too far from your car and sick of walking back to it? This will send the car to you when you place yellow stripes. It also will remove the zone.

Blueprint

Sperwer · Post by **Sperwer** » Wed May 10, 2017 10:47 am

Easy setup for AAI mining aka poor man's railroad

While the example blueprints show how things work they don't work well without some adjustments. So I went down another road and made a blueprint to follow the arrow zones. The result is a very simple circuit that easy can be expanded to allow controlling more vehicles.

Blueprint for 0.14

Blueprint for 0.15

In this setup I'll describe how you could use this to get resources from your miners into the vehicle depot

Place black arrows in the direction the hauler should travel: up, down, left, right. I left the diagonal out but they should be easy to add..
In theory you would only have to place one arrow when the hauler should change direction. But in some situations the circuit can miss an arrow so I go with a 3 wide lane of arrows.

Corners should look like his:

If you would extend the down arrow to the end of the patch and then make the turn the hauler will "derail" and move south eternally (actually it will get stuck or run out of fuel).

Make a path that first runs next to your coal miners, then continue the path to the other resources. This way the hauler will automatically refuel the other miners.

Put a vehicle depot under the path to unload everything.

Set the depot data to accept all ores.

Loop the path back to the start so the hauler will visit the coal miners again.

Issues:
There is no error checking whatsoever. If somehow a hauler goes off the path you can loose it. If the depot is full the hauler will just keep on making laps eventually running out of fuel.

The hauler is moving very slowly. This to make sure it does not miss turns. Add a similar setup with different color arrows and a higher speed if you can't stand it. Obviously you would then have to add black arrow path just before corners to slow it down again.

I have tested this with 1 hauler and 20 mark1 miners. The biggest problem was to unload the depot fast enough to make room for new ores (i'd call it a luxury problem:)

If you extend the path beyond your starting area 1 hauler will not do. Replace the constant combinator with hauler id 1 with something that cycles through your haulers. I've posted a loop through hauler for older versions of aai. The newer versions of aai shouldn't need the wait time. If you are using the loop through haulers blueprint, set the W to around 5. This work up to around 10 haulers. More and the cycle will be too long, causing haulers to miss turns.

Once you mined out the coal you need a second vehicle depot connected to your coal storage. Use circuit network to allow about 200 coal in and set the depot data to -1 coal. This will keep your haulers and miners supplied.

The constant checking of the route is probably not good for performance and power use. This setup is not suited for a large number of vehicles. Eventually i will use something closer to the provided example blueprints and combine it with this to move haulers close to base. Haulers rarely have issues pathing through wilderness but in a base they seem to get stuck behind every building.

Jalordon · Post by **Jalordon** » Fri May 12, 2017 5:24 pm

Several issues encountered:
(Unsure if these issues are known already)

1. The functionality of powering vehicles with battery (if vehicle grids are enabled) instead of fuel is currently bugged.

The code in control.lua has a logic error in consume_fuel_or_equipment :
on line 833

Code: Select all

local energy_used = energy_deficit - math.max(battery.energy, energy_deficit)

Should instead be using math.min

Code: Select all

local energy_used = energy_deficit - math.min(battery.energy, energy_deficit)

Before the change the logic would make it so that energy_used could go negative and result in the battery gaining energy and the vehicle's burn energy going extremely negative, causing the weird behavior.

2. Damage upgrades seem to inconsistently apply to AI controlled vehicle weapons
Per observation, the laser tank works as expected when applying extra damage to its beams (seen by it taking out 350 health spawners in one hit with 160+480 damage penetrating ammo)
Based on that I expected it to also apply to other ammo, but it currently does not work

3. Some inconsistencies with how weapons behave used by AI compared to player

Tank shells fired by the AI fly until they hit something instead of self destructing at the maximum firing range of the cannon.
Since tank shells do retain their penetrative ability this can cause unintended collateral damage.

The laser tank's penetrating ammo when used by a player works as expected (beam penetrates the whole distance), but when used by the AI, the beam is equivalent to the focused ammo homing onto a single target like magazines.

Tank shells do not currently receive researched damage bonuses when used by the AI, a 200 + 640 physical and 100 + 320 explosive damage shell did roughly 300 damage to a 350 health spawner instead of outright destroying it.

The chaingunner however seems to be working with damage upgrades, since it is doing 20-21 damage a shot to spawners (2/15% physical resist) with 5 + 8 = 13 damage regular magazines plus the chaingun's 100% damage boost.

Firespeed upgrades seem to be ignored based on the vanilla tank and the chaingunner. The tank cannon lists 0.67 + 1.53 /s , but the AI shoots at the base 0.67 speed.

The chaingunner seems to ignore speed bonuses on the magazines it is loaded with, noticable when manually shooting a spawner with maximum upgrades compared to letting the AI do so.

On a positive note, 0.15's rendering of the map when zoomed in lets you manually control vehicles way across the map:

Bushdoctor · Post by **Bushdoctor** » Fri May 12, 2017 10:24 pm

Hello,

This mod is absolutely amazing and even though I'm a complete Combinator illiterate, I managed to get a few things working by blindly copying the examples given in the original post.
However, the example for 'Clear Empty Resource Zone' confused me. The description for the settings for the top two Decider Combinators are different from previous descriptions
and do not match up with the options that the combinator gives me.
As shown here:

image

Why is there a double equals-to sign, and why is there no mention of what to set for the X and the Y?
I have made the following setting: Wood = 0 and for both X and Y i set 'Input Count'. Is that correct?

Mobius1 · Post by **Mobius1** » Fri May 12, 2017 11:14 pm

Bushdoctor wrote:Hello,

This mod is absolutely amazing and even though I'm a complete Combinator illiterate, I managed to get a few things working by blindly copying the examples given in the original post.
However, the example for 'Clear Empty Resource Zone' confused me. The description for the settings for the top two Decider Combinators are different from previous descriptions
and do not match up with the options that the combinator gives me.
As shown here:
image
Why is there a double equals-to sign, and why is there no mention of what to set for the X and the Y?
I have made the following setting: Wood = 0 and for both X and Y i set 'Input Count'. Is that correct?

That double = sign is often used in programming languages to determinate that one side is "equal" to the other side, because just one = sign means "set" where the left side would receive the value of the right side. For combinator you read it as just 1 = sign and it'll be fine.

Bushdoctor · Post by **Bushdoctor** » Sat May 13, 2017 12:47 am

Mobius, thanks for the reply.
It seems that things work as they should, so I guess my 'input count' setting was correct as well. Great stuff.

My Mods · Post by **Earendel** » Sat May 13, 2017 3:03 pm

Thanks for reporting these.

Jalordon wrote:Several issues encountered:
(Unsure if these issues are known already)

1. The functionality of powering vehicles with battery (if vehicle grids are enabled) instead of fuel is currently bugged.

The code in control.lua has a logic error in consume_fuel_or_equipment :
on line 833
Code: Select all
local energy_used = energy_deficit - math.max(battery.energy, energy_deficit)
Should instead be using math.min
Code: Select all
local energy_used = energy_deficit - math.min(battery.energy, energy_deficit)
Before the change the logic would make it so that energy_used could go negative and result in the battery gaining energy and the vehicle's burn energy going extremely negative, causing the weird behavior.

That is a bug, when I was updating to 0.15 I rebuilt that section but I could not test it because the vehicle grid mods were not updated (they are not made by me).

Jalordon wrote: 2. Damage upgrades seem to inconsistently apply to AI controlled vehicle weapons
Per observation, the laser tank works as expected when applying extra damage to its beams (seen by it taking out 350 health spawners in one hit with 160+480 damage penetrating ammo)
Based on that I expected it to also apply to other ammo, but it currently does not work

3. Some inconsistencies with how weapons behave used by AI compared to player

Tank shells fired by the AI fly until they hit something instead of self destructing at the maximum firing range of the cannon.
Since tank shells do retain their penetrative ability this can cause unintended collateral damage.

The laser tank's penetrating ammo when used by a player works as expected (beam penetrates the whole distance), but when used by the AI, the beam is equivalent to the focused ammo homing onto a single target like magazines.

Tank shells do not currently receive researched damage bonuses when used by the AI, a 200 + 640 physical and 100 + 320 explosive damage shell did roughly 300 damage to a 350 health spawner instead of outright destroying it.

The chaingunner however seems to be working with damage upgrades, since it is doing 20-21 damage a shot to spawners (2/15% physical resist) with 5 + 8 = 13 damage regular magazines plus the chaingun's 100% damage boost.

There's no way to force a gun or turret to fire so I have to fake the firing with scripts. If a projectile is spawned, but there is no way to specify a damage multiplier and it won't get one from the force (I have raised a support request about this). The problem does not happen with non-projectile weapons (lasers and chaingunners are instant and the bullet trail is a beam effect) because I can apply the damage to the target manually. There's no way to set a max range either.

The laser tank piercing beam would require some fairly complicated code to recreate, and is likely to cause collateral damage. It's on the TODO list,just really low priority becuase people probably won't like the outcome anyway.

Jalordon wrote: Firespeed upgrades seem to be ignored based on the vanilla tank and the chaingunner. The tank cannon lists 0.67 + 1.53 /s , but the AI shoots at the base 0.67 speed.

The chaingunner seems to ignore speed bonuses on the magazines it is loaded with, noticable when manually shooting a spawner with maximum upgrades compared to letting the AI do so.
[/list]

That is also on the TODO list, but gets a bit more complicated because you end up with uneven tick spacing and with high fire speed potentially multiple shots per tick. The code just isn't set up to handle that yet.

Griggers · Post by **Griggers** » Sat May 13, 2017 4:01 pm

There seems to be a bug with vehicles with multiple weapons when using this mod.

The vanilla tank only has his tank cannon and the 2 bobs mods tank only have their gatling gun available.

When disabling this mod they reappear.

Jalordon · Post by **Jalordon** » Mon May 15, 2017 3:50 am

Griggers wrote:There seems to be a bug with vehicles with multiple weapons when using this mod.

The vanilla tank only has his tank cannon and the 2 bobs mods tank only have their gatling gun available.

When disabling this mod they reappear.

Per page 12 it is suggested that it is intended that only a single weapon is enabled with the mod enabled

Earendel wrote:No, 1 weapon per vehicle. This is to make sure vehicles have specialised roles and encourage squads of mixed unit types.

However, the code provided is not hard to change by yourself to restore player use of other weapons on vehicles.

The file entity-update.lua inside aai-programmable-vehicles/prototypes/ has the code that makes vehicles have only one weapon available.

The changes I made that restored vehicle weapons, both for vanilla and other mod vehicles, were just commenting out two lines of code, but I'm hesitant to post the changes because I don't want to be responsible if other code some reason relies on having one weapon and I imagine the mod author does not want to support an unintended change.

My Mods · Post by **Earendel** » Mon May 15, 2017 8:21 am

Even if you change those lines of code the vehicle AI can only load and use 1 weapon.

I like the 1-weapon limit anyway because it forces specialised vehicles.

Ideally for other modded vehicles it would choose the most powerful weapon, but there is no easy way to determine which one is best. At the moment it just picks the first because in vanilla that is the most powerful but some other mods put the most powerful one last.

You could add your own little mod that automatically splits vehicles with multiple guns into multiple variants each with 1 gun. e.g: Tank - Flamethrower, Tank - Cannon, Tank - Machine gun.

Dreadicon · Post by **Dreadicon** » Mon May 15, 2017 10:23 pm

This mod is still amazing, even if for my purposes it's not really worth much. Oh to have a non-biter pathfinding......

One solution I thought of was to make the miner/haulers able to eat trees. If they could, I could just order them in straight lines to/from resources, in theory... I'd just have to route them around water, or just disable water on the map....

Still would be better than biter AI though imo. For logistics the biter AI renders them more a nuisance than helpful, and that was the main thing I wanted to do with them.

websterc87 · Post by **websterc87** » Tue May 16, 2017 3:20 am

Dreadicon wrote:This mod is still amazing, even if for my purposes it's not really worth much. Oh to have a non-biter pathfinding......

One solution I thought of was to make the miner/haulers able to eat trees. If they could, I could just order them in straight lines to/from resources, in theory... I'd just have to route them around water, or just disable water on the map....

Still would be better than biter AI though imo. For logistics the biter AI renders them more a nuisance than helpful, and that was the main thing I wanted to do with them.

dreadicon you can make them go in straight lines if you use subtile x and subtile y or angle and speed. personally i use the zones to create waypoints and iterate over them. miners will eat trees already so it sounds like it already does what you want

Mobius1 · Post by **Mobius1** » Tue May 16, 2017 7:09 am

Hey earendel, would you consider disabling the vehicle weapon limiter override for the vehicles on "Aircraft" mod? I tried plenty of times to make them work with your mods but they don't auto-fire by themselves, my guess is that they don't implement a "turret" over the vehicle like other vehicles do and then they can't fire. The cargo plane is an excellent hauler, it never damages the miner and don't derp around since it flies. All other planes have missiles as their main weapon when with the Flying Fortress plane the best weapon is the tank cannon with the high explosive cannon ammo that can obliterate a 14x14 area with biters but sometimes some random biters escape the blast area and we gotta kill them with the chaingun or the missiles, since only a few random ones survive its best to use the chaingun, so, 2 weapons being used constantly. Huge biter bases with lots of behemoths and some elemental nests (yeah bobwarfare) requires some better AoE weaponry, that's when the atomic bomb missile comes in play. So we use all 3 weapons of the plane.

Not worried about the ground units weaponry limitation as they feels better that way, but on the aircraft, IF they worked with the commands would be fine, but since they won't, kinda pointless to limit them.

Nightinggale · Post by **Nightinggale** » Tue May 16, 2017 5:28 pm

Now I get this while loading my savegame

Error while running event aai-vehicles-miner::on_tick (ID 0)
__aai-vehicles-miner__/control.lua:328: attempt to perform arithmetic on field 'miningtime' (a nil value)

All AAI mods fully updated.

EDIT: Starting a new game gives me the same error the moment I place a miner. At least that tells me that it's likely not the savegame itself, which is corrupt.

EDIT2: works in newest update

Dreadicon · Post by **Dreadicon** » Wed May 17, 2017 5:02 pm

websterc87 wrote:dreadicon you can make them go in straight lines if you use subtile x and subtile y or angle and speed. personally i use the zones to create waypoints and iterate over them. miners will eat trees already so it sounds like it already does what you want

webster, I knew you could make them go in straight lines, but I had forgotten that miners will eat trees already. So as long as I have a miner go out first (which only makes sense anyhow), I suppose this idea will work.

I did find this lua library which might be usable if integrated along with a cached per-chunk accessor (cached table of what chunk edges can get to what other chunk edges thus you run a course pathfinding on the cached set, then a fine one on the actual map data): https://github.com/Yonaba/Jumper
The vehicle could just assume the path is clear and only analyze a small distance in front of it as it goes, re-pathing only when something gets in it's way. Just a thought.

stormrdr21 · Post by **stormrdr21** » Thu May 18, 2017 12:30 am

Avezo wrote:^^

Theyr'e using Dune2000 graphics already, not sure if voices too, but I think it means its free to use now.

Whoever is doing this is taking a risk unless they've made a deal with EA. Westwood was owned by EA when it went belly-up. That means all the IP and copyrights reverted to EA when they closed doors. EA actually still actively publishes the C&C games, which also originally belonged to Westwood.

Copyright law states that IP for a corporation is roughly 95 to 120 years, depending on a few factors. EA would have explicitly either given permission or stated their intention to forfeit their copyright to the Dune2000 IP for anyone else to legally use it.

In short, I'd strongly recommend against using ANY previously published image or voice in a mod, as that could cause the mod to be legally yanked--and get the mod author into some potentially expensive legal situations.

My Mods · Post by **Earendel** » Thu May 18, 2017 1:06 am

Dreadicon wrote:I did find this lua library which might be usable if integrated along with a cached per-chunk accessor (cached table of what chunk edges can get to what other chunk edges thus you run a course pathfinding on the cached set, then a fine one on the actual map data): https://github.com/Yonaba/Jumper
The vehicle could just assume the path is clear and only analyze a small distance in front of it as it goes, re-pathing only when something gets in it's way. Just a thought.

I have been considering writing my own pathfinder mod for a while, but it's going to be such a big task that it's not worth starting if there's even the remotest chance that the built in factorio pathfinder might ever be exposed via the API. That library does look a lot better than the basic A* pathfinders that I'm used to so it would help, but the biggest problem I think will be making the lua tile 'map' match up to factorio world when things get changed. For example, if any mod destroys an object without triggering an event then the two maps are immediately out of sync. For now I'm just waiting for a response on my API request.

Mobius1 wrote:Hey earendel, would you consider disabling the vehicle weapon limiter override for the vehicles on "Aircraft" mod? I tried plenty of times to make them work with your mods but they don't auto-fire by themselves, my guess is that they don't implement a "turret" over the vehicle like other vehicles do and then they can't fire. The cargo plane is an excellent hauler, it never damages the miner and don't derp around since it flies. All other planes have missiles as their main weapon when with the Flying Fortress plane the best weapon is the tank cannon with the high explosive cannon ammo that can obliterate a 14x14 area with biters but sometimes some random biters escape the blast area and we gotta kill them with the chaingun or the missiles, since only a few random ones survive its best to use the chaingun, so, 2 weapons being used constantly. Huge biter bases with lots of behemoths and some elemental nests (yeah bobwarfare) requires some better AoE weaponry, that's when the atomic bomb missile comes in play. So we use all 3 weapons of the plane.

Not worried about the ground units weaponry limitation as they feels better that way, but on the aircraft, IF they worked with the commands would be fine, but since they won't, kinda pointless to limit them.

Hi Mobius1, I hope you'll be happy with the latest update. I'm not going to change the 1-weapon per vehicle limit, but what I have done is add a function that can split an entity prototype so that there are variants with their own weapon. Aircraft has been my test case, so now there are 2 types of gunship, jet, flying fortress each with 1 weapon if you have both Aircraft and AAI vehicles installed. Although you said you use all 3 weapons of a plane, the point of AAI vehicles is that you can have groups of vehicles so really all you need now is 3 vehicles each with 1 of the weapons and keep them together. I've just been having a lot of fun flying around with a wing of 4 gunships with machine guns, some jets with rockets, and a couple of flying fortresses with cannons. Also, I added the cargo plane as a true hauler-type unit so it follows the same inventory transferring rules as the haulers (i.e it can supply the other aircraft or any other type of vehicle).

Soul · Post by **Soul** » Thu May 18, 2017 11:19 pm

In the latest version of all AAI mods and Factorio 0.15.12, I was sitting in a hauler and drag-selected the hauler with my Unit Remote Controller, and the server crashed with the following error message:

Code: Select all

2675.928 Error MainLoop.cpp:850: Exception at tick 153644: Error while running event aai-programmable-vehicles::on_player_selected_area (ID 49)
Unknown sprite "virtual-signal/signal-grey"
stack traceback:
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:1938: in function 'remote_gui_unit_button'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2002: in function 'remote_show_gui'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2237: in function <__aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2165>
2675.933 Error ServerMultiplayerManager.cpp:94: MultiplayerManager failed: "Error while running event aai-programmable-vehicles::on_player_selected_area (ID 49)
Unknown sprite "virtual-signal/signal-grey"
stack traceback:
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:1938: in function 'remote_gui_unit_button'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2002: in function 'remote_show_gui'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2237: in function <__aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2165>"
2675.933 Info ServerMultiplayerManager.cpp:670: mapTick(153644) changing state from(InGame) to(Failed)

Edit: I just tried again outside the vehicle and it still crashed.

My Mods · Post by **Earendel** » Fri May 19, 2017 1:48 am

Soul wrote:In the latest version of all AAI mods and Factorio 0.15.12, I was sitting in a hauler and drag-selected the hauler with my Unit Remote Controller, and the server crashed with the following error message:

Code: Select all

2675.928 Error MainLoop.cpp:850: Exception at tick 153644: Error while running event aai-programmable-vehicles::on_player_selected_area (ID 49)
Unknown sprite "virtual-signal/signal-grey"
stack traceback:
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:1938: in function 'remote_gui_unit_button'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2002: in function 'remote_show_gui'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2237: in function <__aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2165>
2675.933 Error ServerMultiplayerManager.cpp:94: MultiplayerManager failed: "Error while running event aai-programmable-vehicles::on_player_selected_area (ID 49)
Unknown sprite "virtual-signal/signal-grey"
stack traceback:
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:1938: in function 'remote_gui_unit_button'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2002: in function 'remote_show_gui'
        __aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2237: in function <__aai-programmable-vehicles__/control.lua:2165>"
2675.933 Info ServerMultiplayerManager.cpp:670: mapTick(153644) changing state from(InGame) to(Failed)

Edit: I just tried again outside the vehicle and it still crashed.

Do you have a mod installed that has removed the grey signal?

Mobius1 · Post by **Mobius1** » Fri May 19, 2017 2:15 am

Earendel wrote:Hi Mobius1, I hope you'll be happy with the latest update. I'm not going to change the 1-weapon per vehicle limit, but what I have done is add a function that can split an entity prototype so that there are variants with their own weapon. Aircraft has been my test case, so now there are 2 types of gunship, jet, flying fortress each with 1 weapon if you have both Aircraft and AAI vehicles installed. Although you said you use all 3 weapons of a plane, the point of AAI vehicles is that you can have groups of vehicles so really all you need now is 3 vehicles each with 1 of the weapons and keep them together. I've just been having a lot of fun flying around with a wing of 4 gunships with machine guns, some jets with rockets, and a couple of flying fortresses with cannons. Also, I added the cargo plane as a true hauler-type unit so it follows the same inventory transferring rules as the haulers (i.e it can supply the other aircraft or any other type of vehicle).

Cool, gonna test it out then.

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