Profile of Sie_Sayoka

Since this has come up a lot I figured it'd be helpful to some people. An AI only upgrade will allow you to enable or disable features for the AI. This can be for disabling certain units and abilities, or for better management of AI behavior. I am unsure if all of the steps are necessary but it's what has worked for me and will always work assuming the map the mod is played on is functioning properly.

Before we go over the steps it's important that we learn a bit about how AI functions. The AI will have a list of tasks that it needs to do sorted by an enigmatic priority. It can assign multiple tasks at once, assuming it has the ability to do so. For example, a building can only train or upgrade one at a time. To prevent issues it's best to add the AI only upgrade to something that can't build/upgrade/train anything at the start of the match.

• 1. Create your AI only upgrade.
  
  • Owner_type: player.
    
  • All costs: 0.
    
  • Ui_position: -1.
    
  
  
• 2. Add the upgrade to ai_economy\default, or a custom ai_economy if your mod uses one.
  • Player_upgrades
    
    • utility: 1000
      
    • utility_random_range_offset: -1.
      
  • Upgrades
    
    • per_unit_scale: 1
      
    • per_unit_scale_historical: 1
      
    • utility: 1000
      
    • utility_random_range_offset: -1.
      
  
  
• 3. Assign the entity which will do the upgrading. As mentioned before you wouldn't want it on something that could conflict with it upgrading. Here are the entities I've used:
  
  • AEF: armor_command_mp
    
  • Brit: brit_weapon_rack_bren_lmg_mp
    
  • OST: german_hq_mp
    
  • OKW: west_german_hq_mp
    
  • SOV: hq_mp (untested, might not work)
    
  
  
• 4. Add the upgrade to the each army category.
  
  • Ai_production_info
    
    • create new unlocking_upgrade_info
      
      • Upgrade_pbg: your AI only upgrade
        
      • All other fields here must be filled, it doesn't matter what is there.
        
  
  
• 5. Set your requirement_actions with the AI only upgrade for squads, upgrades, and abilities that you wish to disable/enable for the AI.
  

1. Copy the weapon/weapon_bag/behavior settings from a vanilla team weapon MG to the MG that isn't working. In ebps/holdable_ext check to see that this is hold_heavy_machine_gun.

2. In sbps/squad_ui_ext/race_list/ext_key you need to add the race separately. For capturable units such as vehicles and team weapons this is needed to have dialogue since you cannot have dialogue from other races.

Copy the speaker_generic, speaker_specific, speaker_specific_alt, speech_code_2, and speech_code_3 letter codes from the squad you would like the dialogue from.

I haven't tried changing race specific AI personally but if you manage to get the ai only upgrades working then you wont need it since you can just use a not requirement.

AI has quite a lot of checks and requirements needed before it can perform a task such as an AI only upgrade.

1. The AI needs to be able to afford the upgrade. I assume you put costs to 0.
2. Needs to be correctly set up with ai_economy under player_upgrades and upgrades.
3. The entity that has the upgrade available needs to not be queued with other things. I found that if you just stick the upgrade on an HQ or something the AI will not attempt the upgrade because it's building other things. Put it on an entity that does not have any other spawners or upgrades.
4. There are other factors which influence the priorities. Go to army>ai_production_info>unlocking_upgrade_list, add a new unlocking_upgrade_info, in the upgrade_pbg add the upgrade you want ai to use. The other slots can be filled with anything, it doesn't matter.

Additionally:

SneakEye
—
3/10/24, 1:57 AM
Add an armor_modifier inside the upgrade, with value multiplication 1. The AI somehow takes the modifiers into account with their decisionmaking and armor modifiers seem to have the highest priority, even if it has no effect with value x1.

Yes disabling replays will do a bit but wont fix an issue that would be caused by the mod itself.

If you're really committed to diagnosing why it's lagging take FPS logs of both vanilla and your mod as baseline comparisons.

Then make a copy of your mod and start reverting changes half at a time. i.e. delete half of the things in the 'instances' folder for your copied mod, then see if there's lag. If it doesn't lag then the issue would be in the deleted half, if it does lag then delete half again. Repeat this process until you've narrowed it down.

This method is known as half splitting. It's useful but only if there's a singular cause. It also wont work if the cause is from two instances in conjunction i.e. a unit with an ability. For your purposes the causes would most likely be within the abilities, sbps, ebps, or any of the ai folders so I'd start by deleting those first.

You'll want to take extra care to not overwrite your mod with the copy. Ultimately it'd take several hours to diagnose but perhaps you'll get lucky.

For lag you can take a look at this thread to get an idea of what may be your issue. The game speed is directly correlated to your frame rate and by extension your graphics card and processing power. This is a good indicator to use when diagnosing how much it's lagging and what, if any, specific units are causing it. You may want to use a program to log your frame rate.

I don't know the specifics of your mod but my guesses are:
1. Pathing. Will take up the most processing power and maps are key. A map with bad pathing will lead to lag as units will not be able to move to where they want to. If you aren't already, use a 2v2 vanilla map.
2. Test conditions. If you're using cheat commands it'd be easy to just set your HQ as invincible and go afk. This is bad since the AI has trouble moving all of its forces to attack a base, even in vanilla. In general having idle units is bad for some reason and will cause a lot of lag.
3. Abilities. Units will scan an area around them constantly for the opportunity to use an ability. This will cause lag. You can consider removing some abilities for AI with an AI specific upgrade.
4. Units and popcap. If your mod has a lot of them then it's going to compound the issue.

Diagnosing the source of lag is very time consuming. Good luck.