Author Topic: [idea] bloodthirsty bots  (Read 1328 times)

rather than using arbitrary pathfinding nodes that players must place down, why not have injured players automatically leave behind nodes that bots can follow, like a 'blood trail' or 'pheromone trail'

basically bots follow their usual routine of wandering around and attacking players, but on injury, a player will periodically leave behind pools of 'blood' (either real puddles or just invisible nodes) of varying strength based on the injury. bots, with various detection settings and weights, could send out a radius search to seek out and follow the blood trails (which disappear after a while). the expected behavior is bots hunting down injured players relentlessly until they are dead, or until the player heals / the blood trail disappears. with this same idea it would be feasible for bots themselves to leave behind their own trails, which other friendly/enemy bots could use to follow them into battle. if a bot dies too quickly, maybe they can leave behind a 'danger' trail that lets other bots know that they may be walking into a dangerous trap and to avoid it and prioritize a different trail.

it would be very similar to ant pheromones, which help other ants recognize paths that are guaranteed to lead to food. in our case the 'food' is players. the pheromone solution offers a simple ass straightforward pathfinding solution by just following real players as they flee certain death, in real time.


something like this is insanely easy to implement and the trail itself / detection could be really inexpensive. it might be an easier, more realistic alternative to pathfinding/node placing
« Last Edit: March 31, 2021, 07:31:39 PM by PhantOS »

the only reason this hasnt been done i think is due to the sheer amount of manual work required to node a map via moving around in it, to the point that its easier to manually node it. and also to create a system that properly collapses nodes for efficiency and whatnot

temporary trails are unhelpful as it wont significantly help a bot be able to follow the trail as pathing to the start or midpoint of the trail may not be trivial. a good idea in concept but the amount of data that needs to be managed makes this prohibitively expensive due to how slow blockland scripts are
« Last Edit: April 25, 2021, 08:52:09 PM by Conan »