Moving bots in training room

I know it's been brought up quite a few times now, but it's getting nowhere and we all need to make the devs aware of it, by continually posting about it. Would it really be that hard to have bots moving in a set direction continuously or simply strafing in a put position? And don't give me the "aw just play the damn game", because alot of the time there's **** all people around to shoot and to get to any fights is pretty friggin' tiring

We have been asking for this since the game came out.

maybe there should even be bots on Koltyr.. so new players can get some experience that way.

Making targets move in VR would take a lot of code.
This is why the devs added a "Free Trial" button for getting the feel for a weapon in Live before actually buying it.

You should at least be able to roadkill the bots.

Instead of banning players, harness them to control the target dummies trapped in the shooting gallery. Turn off their ability to fire, emote, or use chat and there you go.

I wonder how hard would it be to code it. They can pretty much just change one of target's world coordinates over time and it will move. It will move without any animation and in straight line, but on the range it will do, for a bit of training at least.

Scary, that is just dead wrong.

Any simpleton programmer can set up what are called "waypoint lists." It's a simple list of 3D vectors (x,y,z) or 'points' that any movable NPC can follow. Generally you just keep looping through the list and the NPCs can walk, run, drive or fly to them depending on what the NPC is. It is simplicity itself for any competent programmer and it is the most basic linear algebra there is.

Since these guys can't fix the easy "dropping from the sky" bug, another super simple one to fix, I guess that explains it all.

That is glorious

There are several problems with this.
1. The free trial is unreasonably short. (30 minutes)
2. The trial cooldown is unreasonably long. (30 DAYS)
3. You don't get free attachments on trial weapons and it is silly to buy them.
4. You are still playing on live so the stats count.
5. You are still playing on live so you can't practice hitting at specific ranges.
6. You are still playing on live so you have to worry about positioning and people shooting back.
7. Once you have a decent amount of kills on your main gun you'll have enough certs to just buy the next one you want.

All these combined is why I never trial guns. It is absolutely pointless.

Well said.

Dev's, if you are reading, care to address this issue?

Also go ahead and address any of the other myriad of issues, problems, bugs, and suggestions posted on this forum - if you would like to show that you care (and I certainly hope you do!). Thanks!

just make them simulate MLG ADADing lol

No, quite the opposite. It takes almost no code work and just some effort setting up waypoints for the bots.

OP's idea is good but in no way new...it's been asked for since VR day 1.
It's easy to do yet they won't. A training area with no moving targets is insufficient and bad. Inexperienced players cannot accumulate enough experience to actually be nearly ready for battle.

1. Wrong, as others have pointed out.
2. VR isn't just about testing weapons, genius. You can also go there to practice aiming and moving targets would help with that. This would help newer players get used to shooting moving targets (this game has horribly slow bullet velocity so it needs to be learned) and even good players could make good use of it for some training.


It is beyond stupid that this hasn't been done yet. Get on it.

this is just so wrong
I am a programmer myself and I can tell you this, implementing moving bots to the VR would take little to no work at all from the dev team. The main reason behind this is that they ALREADY have ALL THE CODE NEEDED in Landmark, another SOE game which uses the same game engine(Forgelight) so they could probably copy-paste 99% of the code into Planetside. Estimated work time: less than an hour, rly. And even if for some reason they can't use the Landmark code, creating a simple waypoint list is so easy it shouldn't take more than several hours of work.

Don't even bother, I suggested a similiar idea three times before but no, simple ideas are not shiny enough to attract much attention.
I'm sorry to say this but this thread will quickly get burried in "add space combat" , "nerf Vanu" and "giant mechs in Planetside" kind of absurd threads.

However, I fully support the idea, I just don't believe it can come true.

Except the bots arent actual bots (physics entities) in the way as you expect here, not like players, they would have to add all that code too.

Devs themselves before the split said it was never going to happen as it was too complex for a non essential feature, its even less likely to happen now.

No, that's not correct at all. We don't even need running bots. We just need moving bots. On a pole. Back and forth. The movement itself is really easy to program. Sync among players is already coded. It would work the same as shooting dummies now.

So the only thing to program is one matrix of waypoints for virtual object that ALREADY exists... We're not asking for a complex VR zone. In the beginning something VERY simple is enough to make a great way for people to practice before LIVE.

Yeah, I think one bot that ADAD's and another that runs in a straight line front to back would take care of pretty much all my training needs. Actually, I haven't been in VR for a while, are there any enemy Spitfire turrets in there? That would be good practice too.

Nope. All player characters / toons have a class called a "Character Controller." I'm going to use toon and character interchangeably so I don't have to type so much. And this is a somewhat simplified explanation.

This Character Controller's purpose is to translate keyboard and mouse events (input) into actions performed by the toon.

You press 'W' and the toon moves forward usually by calling a function in the character controller called RUN or WALK. You press 'space' and the toon jumps by calling a function in the character controller called JUMP. Most importantly for this discussion, we have code to turn the toon in any general direction we want, through the arrow keys or mouse movement input. It usually calls a function called SET_DIRECTION in the, you guessed it, the character controller. This also provides an 'interface' for other code to interact with the player toon 'object.' That code already exists, it's there.

There are a set of classes, perhaps from a library, that performs the so-called physics in this game. It's generally used for hit detection, object detection, like a wall or rock etc., possibly ground detection, etcetera. Given DBG took out the commercial physics engine I think they are using their own. That code exists.

A toon always "knows where it is." It knows where it is so it can interact with the 3D world. Always. This is done through a Position Vector (x,y,z). It's rapidly updated constantly every time the toon moves.

So we have code and various interfaces that can guide a toon - rather easily - in any direction. It knows where it is and can detect that a physics event has happened, like being shot, that is, hit detection. It's all there now. Do you see?

So we have everything we need to set and guide our toon in an external programmatic way. Now we just need to set a waypoint list so the toon knows where to go, we tell it to RUN to a waypoint making sure we have SET_DIRECTION to face and run to the correct waypoint. It will know if it's been hit and can die in all its glory for us when needed. We just loop through the waypoint list and update it when we reach one, then send the toon to the next. Variation of behavior of all sorts can be 'played with' with this scheme. You could make the toon jump and skip to the next waypoint, whatever.

Notice in the VR all those toons just standing around running an IDLE animation? They could be made to run around as well, as described above. Ding.

All that should, and can be programmed by any competent programmer who calls themselves a professional graphics programmer.

Well given it's DBG / SOE sure, that explains A CRAP TONNE about DBG / SOE doesn't it. And a whole lot more about its management. <sigh>

its not even that, its a destroyable object, theres no animations, theres no ai, no controller and all for what? just to make a few targets move in a place where 99% of players arent?

If you have a gripe about DBG then gripe but making out it would be easy and blaming them as if theyve fallen down not providing it is just stupid, resource allocations didnt work out to allow adding them, end of story, there are far more important things needing code support. Go out to a base if you want moving targets.