Battlezone 1

No matter whether you give command "Follow me" or "Follow close", every unit will act the same, follow at 42m distance. One of those two commands is obviously broken.

I think the Follow Me command is broken; it should be a longer distance, like 50m or so.

This is not a quiz show. Ken has the code, he will look into it and give us the correct answer.



The real question is: why is it broken and can/should it be fixed?

I looked in the AI code, and the follow range setting doesn't do all that much. OffensiveProcess will attack if it's within the follow range of the unit it's following and an enemy is within engagement range. Otherwise it reverts back to standard follow behavior, which seems to have fixed ranges. It follows normally until it gets more than 100 meters away, then engages "catch" behavior until it gets within 50 meters. Otherwise it tries to match velocity (or facing if stationary).

Yes that is accurately how it works in practice in the game.

But the reason why the 2 command alternatives have offensive AI act exactly the same way, could this be that the programmers did not find any other function that would have made sence for the game? So maybe you guys gave up and just filled out something in the command display? Or could command 8 be broke..

If you for instance build a Scout and hit 1 key (offensive units), then hit 1 (unit 1 - the Scout), then you can hit either 1 or 8 in the command display list ("follow me", or "follow close"), but these 2 alternatives will make no difference whatsoever for the way the Scout will act.
The only difference is that the Scout says "follow the leader" or "protecting".

Just sort of wondering what you guys may have had in mind for command alternative 8, and the reason why you gave it up.
Or maybe there is a command alternative just waiting for being activated

this has defiantely always been something ive been curious about. my experimentation yielded pretty much exactly what jonblund said.

There's no problem with the AI code, they execute each follow command well (1-follow me & 8-follow close). The issue is in both commands working the same way, and having 2 commands doing the same thing is obviously not intentional. There must be a mistake somewhere, probably with "follow close", since not every unit has that command.

how about the speed, do they accelerate at the same speed?

Well, you can always test, but I doubt anything is different. The part of the code I posted is BZ code. I always assumed 75 and 125 were BZ distances and that's why I said one command must be broken.

Maybe Ken could investigate what is each "follow" supposed to do?