I’ve been experimenting a bit with the CDK, using some of the documentation on both the current and former War Thunder wikis, and I’ve noticed that there’s a difference between how an AI ground vehicle made in the CDK will turn in the resulting User Mission (as seen in some examples in the wikis) and how the ground-vehicle bots you can get in Custom Battles will turn.
When I make a User Mission with a moving AI ground vehicle, it turns very crudely and unrealistically; it always acts as if it is some sort of tracked vehicle that can revolve in place, even when the vehicle is a wheeled one that should need to move forward or backward while steering in order to turn around. Obvious examples are the Chinese M8 Greyhound and the Italian AB 41, but the problem seems to be general. By contrast, if I create a Custom Battle including bots that are in wheeled vehicles (for example, one that includes China and/or Italy with the BR level restricted to 1.0, for which some of the bots will be Chinese M8 Greyhounds and/or Italian AB 41s), those bots do not turn in that way; the vehicles turn realistically, moving forward or backward while steering in order to turn. Clearly the AI system has some capability to make wheeled ground vehicles turn in this way, but is that capability accessible from the CDK? If so, how does one do it? Any help would be appreciated.
For what I know the navigation system in this game utilize a nav-mesh system for the bots, which look something like this:
This is avaliable to ground and naval map only, and normally the bot will follow the red and yellow line you see in the picture. So it’s highly unlikely the bot in ground map will wander around, but instead focusing on a specific path and executing a pre set path-finding algorithm. So it can lead to issues like traffic jamming, like the clump of bots in the middle and right side here:
(picture taken in 2021, was practising indirect fire back then, doesn’t think it’s possible until a person name Loner appeared on Youtube)
But in the case for user mission, the units follows a path set by you (aka waypoints), which behaves differenly compared to nav-mesh.
Normally waypoints instruct the unit to go straight along a path, but nav-mesh “suggests” which directions the units can go to reach it’s destination.
I’m uncertain if these were the main cause of your observation, but in the CDK when you create waypoints there’s a few options like canUsePathFinder and moveType; or in the Action trigger → unitsetProperties → Movement params you can find options like advanceCollisionAvoidance and ignoreCollisions. You can explore these options in you mission and see if they’ll result in any additional behaviours.
Since the game engine Gaijin uses to develope War Thunder is company owned, it’s not known to the public how they design vehicle navigation. But since it’s not feasiable to design navigation system individually for each vehicle, a better way to do is desigate each design by type (e.g tracked or wheeled). So with the above surmise, combined with known algorithm used for pathfinding, the bot’s behaviour inconsistence is therefore reasonable.
