Far Cry 4 - Map Editor - A.I movements, Waves and Animation Points
I forgot to put in the title that I am using the Xbox 360 version of the game.
I've been chipping away some final touches to an Outpost map which I spent a few days creating, only to find there are some really frustrating issues with the A.I which don't appear to have anyway round them at the moment. I appreciate there are going to be a lot of things which the developers haven't added to this feature yet, but I wondered if anyone else has any smart ways around them, or perhaps some insight into them.
Firstly is the A.I's free-roam of the map. Now while I appreciate this is exactly what A.I is supposed to do as it would be pretty robotic otherwise, however I am creating a fairly linear outpost map with different sections, bases and sniper towers etc. I seem to find that not only does the A.I wander away from the position you place them in, but they are wandering all the way over to the other end of the map, so enemies I am placing towards the end of my map are halfway through it by the time you reach that section and there is no one 'guarding' the end section.
I've tried working around this by placing barriers in places which A.I cannot traverse, but then have had the issue where the enemy soldiers get to the barriers and all wander around in that area as a group making them easy pickings for a sneaky grenade. By the time you get to these sections you don't even see the end of the map because you've killed all the enemies before you even reach it.
Another way in which I tried to overcome this was by placing Animation Points directly where the A.I spawns with around 3000 as the duration for the animation. While this worked for a few of them, others further on in the map were just completely bypassing these points as if they didn't exist. Also there seems to be an odd issue when I try to edit the settings for the animation points. Sometimes it will bring up the menu which allows me to choose the duration of the animation and which faction can use it, but most of the time it just brings up a menu saying 'Spawn once', 'Always respawn' and 'Always respawn out of sight'? I don't really see how these are relevant to an animation point or why it seems to change between this and the normal settings menu?
Finally the enemy waves on an Outpost map. Can you only place 1 wave of enemies on these maps? As the 'Reinforcements' wave takes up the place of what would be 'Wave 2' and 'Wave 3' does not trigger until at least 1 person from the previous wave is dead. You cannot seem to change which wave the 'Reinforcements' are set to, and considering the ideal play-through of a map would be without triggering any alarms so you would never see a 3rd wave of enemies. Does anyone know any different?
Any help or information about the above issues would be most appreciated.
My Solutions (PS4 Friendly)
So, I saw someone on Reddit asking if there was a tutorial or some type of guide for the map editor. I was surprised to find nothing online. I did find, however, a map editor manual within the editor. just bring up the menu by pressing options button on ps4 (old start button) while in the editor (I answered this here, rather than Reddit because its the 1st thread I found in Google and I think a lot of people will view this).
Now for the enemy wave problem. The only workaround I came up with at the moment is this: In the map editor manual, you will see a section about Navigation Mesh. Its the area in which players may roam. View this mesh by going to the menu and choose editor settings. Set "Show Nav Mesh" to "character." Ok, so now we can see where the enemy is able to roam. The easiest ways I've found to disrupt this mesh is by placing an impassable object or by editing the terrain.
In my map, I have area1, which contains my 1st wave of enemies. I interrupted the Nav Mesh between area1 and 2 (2 contains the second wave).
If you scroll down in the wave window you can change the trigger so the wave will spawn after a percentage of enemies from the previous wave have been killed. I set mine to 75%
If area1 is far enough away from area2 so that the enemies do not roam close enough to detect the player, then they seem not to wander toward the player, so they wont go all the way to the other side of the map. Furthermore, if you place a sniper on a hill, the mesh should only allow him to roam on top of that hill. Or, you can place debris or useless objects to disrupt the mesh making a zone in which the enemy cannot leave. Keep in mind, enemies cannot cross gaps in the mesh, but the player can.
I hope all this helps as i was getting a bit frustrated with these issues as well. Still not completely satisfied, but hopefully this will inspire some new ideas to make these maps better.