[4.000]AI being very, very passive

[CMaster]

Tried to post this in bug reports, not allowed.
Coming here because I mentioned the issue in a RockPaperShotgun thread and was encouraged by some of the community to post it here

So, downloaded the new demo of 4.000. Installed, ran everything fine. Hit up a friend for some coop action. 2 of us vs 2 x level 7 "Easier Types" AI. All settings to default save uping ship speed to normal (trying a V1.X version everything felt so sloooowww). Played through the 3 hours of the demo pretty happily. One thing however - the AI pretty much just sat there and took our abuse. No waves. No attacks on our systems at all. No bringing in reinforcements from neighbouring systems. No calling in units at warp gates or Special Forces. Only AI Eyes resulted in any real action from the AI. We initally had no real way of detecting cloaked units - several of our systems ended up with a large number of cloaked AI ships in it - that did nothing, even when the system was left undefended until we hunted them down.

Seems AI War doesn't have a replay feature (would be nice) but have posted the save as an attachment.

Host machine:
Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit
Core2Duo E6400
4gb PC6400 Ram
Realtek HD Sound
ATI Radeon HD4850

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums; I'll take a look

[x4000]

It's possible there was an issue with the ai thread -- can you check in the runtimedata folder to see if there were any errors logged? It's also possiblethat you wound up with some super defensive ai's or something, just by chance. Most people have been finding the ai more brutal than ever, from reports.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, yea, neither of the AIs is a passive type.  Will let it run for a bit to see if it does anything aggressive or hits errors.

[CMaster]

Yeah, there's 50k odd of AI errors. Don't look very meaningful mind.
Attached, along with the other error doc.

Even if they were both passive types, the tooltips say that they should still border aggress etc. Never happened.

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, yea, I actually put in fixes to prevent those errors earlier today, but that update isn't out just yet.

So yea, the AI was having errors and thus couldn't do much.

The errors in your UnhandledErrors.txt are unrelated but show me an issue with the stats screen that I need to fix; many thanks

[keith.lamothe]

CMaster, I don't recall if you mentioned it already, but are you and your friend on OSX or Windows (or one of each)? 

[CMaster]

Both Windows 7 64 bit.
My rough specs are in the first post, dropping a DXDiag in this one. Can ask for my teammate's specs if you want.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, very good to know about it happening on Windows, we had thought it was an OSX-only thing since the only reports of it were from that side.  That's hopeful, actually, as I can deal with it just being an error in the code.  Hardware-specific stuff is much worse.

I think the plan is to push out the prerelease with the fixes tonight, though it might be tomorrow if Chris is busy.

[Winter Born]

Thanks CMaster and welcome to the forums.

Need to make the registration for Mantis BT easier.

[CMaster]

I didn't want to go straight to the bugtracker until establishing it was really.
Also, the guys at RPS were encouraging me to come here.

Edit: Good to hear fixes may already be out there.
Also yeah, the couple of times I accidentally brought up the stats screen, it seemed to be blank. There were lots of tabs though, so I didn't think much of it.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, I just committed the fixes for the stats screen; the AIErrors you saw I've already put in what protections we can, and if any of those are triggered it will log the event in a much-easier-for-us-developers-to-find fashion to FailedAssertions.txt.  Basically I set about six dozen mousetraps for it

Thanks!