Monster AI in line with 2.0

First I'd like to say I totally agree with this post here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...g-back-mob-AI!

It's about bringing back mob AI such as deer running and certain monsters warning before attacking you.



Really what I want to talk about is monsters during battle though.

I understand that most of this couldn't take place until sufficient server/UI improvements have been made, but none-the-less I'd like to get it out there.

Monster or Character collision:
Not really sure what it's defined as, but the fact that groups of monsters overlap. I hope that with server improvement that we can move back towards having character collision between our monsters. (we don't need to collide with them, but they should collide with each other.

Why?
1. This game is a graphical beauty, yet our monsters are sharing the same space. Plus it will help add that final fantasy feel. You fighting five orcs, not you fighting what appears to be a blob of five orcs (ffii refrence? lol; it's old anyway), monsters were always spread out in battle they never overlapped. it just feels fake and cheap, and I don't mean to bash, i'm just hoping this changes for 2.0 ^^

2. It will add more strategy to battle (gonna go a little further with this when I talk about some enmity adjustments). Right now, we can heard large groups of monsters into the same tiny space, making it very easy to gather large groups of mobs that almost any class can fit in there AOE range. If mosnters were more spread out, battles would become harder because they would be spread out, causing mages to have to position themselves better to hit everything and melee wouldn't be able to hit entire crowds for 10-15 mobs.


How this could be further effected by changing enmity calculations...
(honestly something like this was probably in the game to start with, but I never got to try it out at the time it was present)

A few things here:

Have monsters fight as teams.

Say one player vs. two enemies...
Have one enemy fight the play face to face, while the other runs behind to get those awesome crits in.

one player vs. 4 enemies...
One from front, three going for crits from behind, with the addtion that if you change targets, the following three go right back to trying for those crits from behind.

party of player vs party of enemies...
have enemies share hate.
This can be done either through the linking system or somehow add all enemies to the list of enemies currently with hate/aggro.
(they don't have to completely share hate, but you'll understand what I'm getting at in a sec)

Lets say we have a five on five fight, the player party has one healer. Rather then the healer curing and all the monster rushing at them, have one or two monsters run at them, the rest continue fighting as normal.

From a programming standpoint this could be done by splitting hate into groups.
Healing generated enmity, attack generated enmity and defensively generated enmity.
(enhancing magic can fall under healing enmity and enfeebling (or debuffing) magic to attack enmity)



Last but not least, increased enmity generated by attacking sweet spots. (such as attacks from behind)

For instance two players vs one enemy.
one player gets in it's face while the other attacks from behind.

Why on earth would a monster stand there and fight the gladiator doing a tenth of the damage when the lancer is behind it doing massive damage poking it with a stick. that monster would either turn every now and again and attack the lance signaling it to back the heck off, or it would just say screw this dinkally lil gladiator and his dull knife and just focus fully on the lancer.

increasing enmity generated from attacks from behind would add this sort of effect.
Plus we have abilites like cover and trick attack (or w/e it's called to deal with this)

example...
Gladiator front, lance back.
Lancer does big attack, enemy turns. Gladiator runs to protect his friend with cover (or lance could run to the aid of the Gladiator) and the lancer can add some trick attack badness to regain hate.

Also, throw in some deadly back attacks like flail spike or attacks where NM deal AOE strikes to those behind them when too much enmity is generated back there.

Sorry for the length of this, thought I'd share my thoughts.

Also, I'm fairly sure stuff like this was in place, but server lag made it impossible to deal with.

Let me know if you like or dislike any of this, if there's anything I missed or anything you'd like to see.

Nothing like killing a MASSIVE frog, and then running right through it as if it weren't even there.

As a programmer, I've come to tell you that it's not technically feasible to have monsters colliding with each other due to CPU issues.

Complicated AI like this is extremely expensive and as we've seen, Square probably doesn't have the quality of server developers needed to have any chance of implementing this without breaking the servers. Even if they did have top notch server developers (and chances of that are slim, because they almost exclusively live in North America), this would be a huge undertaking, and the hardware needed to support it would be ridiculously expensive to maintain.

I think there was a misunderstanding. Sorry
I didn't mean Collide with like an animated action. I was referring to Character Collision.
What keeps characters from falling through the terrain or bumping into one another.
It doesn't seem very costly to me.

They had it in at one point, and complicated enemy AI, but they removed most of it likely do to server lag and targeting issues. To me that's no reason why they can't bring it back with the new servers. They can probably use most of what they had originally and just improve on that.

Just wanted to throw out, I think some of this is in place. Wolf-type enemies that attack in packs like in guildleves tend to have any that you aren't focused on try to circle around you, or at least it seems that way >.> Correct me if I'm wrong...

Cactuars also move around like little jackasses so you have trouble staying in range/facing them.

Either way it means that there's potential for this kind of enemy behavior.

It would be fun if mobs acted more like actual living things and responded accordingly to what you would expect. There are skills you can dodge, for example moles and puks, but the dreadfull lag prevents this from being as easy as it should be. Even if I am standing far out of the way I might actually allready have been hi, its just my screen who hasnt shown it yet, so it looks silly when me standing 10 meters away is hit.