News

In Development: Wheeled AI

Jan 19th | 2021

Commanders!

In the near future, we’ll be making several major changes to the AI vehicles and today, in the first part of two articles focused on PvE, we’d like to tell you more about the first one – the addition of wheeled AI vehicles.

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Adding these vehicles hasn’t been easy as the engine originally didn’t support their pathfinding. Simply put, they could go forward but not steer properly and were getting stuck all the time. For some time, we considered implementing these vehicles by using various workarounds. For example, one idea was to create “invisible fake tracks” and allow the vehicles to behave kind of like tracked vehicles would have, including turning on the spot and so on.

Naturally, that’s not an ideal state of things and could lead to some strange situations. That is why we took our time and did it right. Wheeled AI vehicles will therefore behave the way they are supposed to.

The obvious question at this point is, how will this affect your gameplay experience? After all, there won’t be more AI vehicles per map, they will just be different.

Right off the bat, we are not interested in making you suffer through more ATGMs. The added wheeled vehicles are mostly armed with guns and we’ll be making sure that the ATGM situation doesn’t become worse, for example by not introducing the most notorious wheeled ATGM launchers (such as the Shadow or Kornet-EM) to the AI pool.

Here’s the preliminary list of the wheeled vehicles we’ll be adding as AI opponents: