AI sidekicks invincible on Normal (Samurai) difficulty setting

[Sat42]

Hello to the team,

Thank you for the continued work on patching Daikatana. I am almost onboard to start playing the game. I am reporting this here mainly because after installing the latest 1.3 patch yesterday in preparation of my first ever playthrough of the game, I wanted to highlight a potentially serious issue which I came across while gathering info on the game and current state of the community patch: the invincibility of AI sidekicks on the Normal/Medium difficulty setting.

Apparently, on this setting they are supposed to take damage, have no friendly fire and have regenerating health - except they actually remain invincible just as on the Easy setting, according to a late September 2018 Steam review by Foxysen (which goes into a good bit of detail about this). I hesitated to call this new issue a bug, as I will also take this opportunity to make what is effectively a proposal, but seeing as the sidekicks were not meant to be invincible on the Samurai setting I decided to flag this as an actual error.

As for me, I will not play on the Shogun/Hard setting just to get vulnerable (although with 5000HP instead of the vanilla 100HP!) sidekicks, I wish to play the game on the Normal setting the way it was meant to be played - with sidekicks that have no more health than you (100HP), no regenerating health, etc. - but of course with all the debugging, pathnoding, geometry, AI code enhancements provided by the 1.3 community patch. It's not like 1.1 or 1.2 is impossible to finish after all.

Seeing as you may fear that - even with all the improvements to navigation, the debugging etc. - such a default solution for the Samurai setting might scare away the few potential players who may want to give the game a chance (however IMO, most of the few players that may still come to Daikatana would be interested in a fixed-but-as-close-to-the-original-vision version of the game, as I am), I would suggest adding options in the menu (as you have already done for so many other parameters): 1. make it not just a choice of all or nothing with respect to sidekicks, and when the player chooses to have them, don't make their properties hidden, but allow for choosing: 2. whether to have them invincible, 3. whether to activate friendly fire, 4. whether to have regenerating health, and - heck, 5. how much health they should have, starting from 100HP (original - might be good to mention that so that the purists don't need to ask questions), and all the way up to 1000HP in steps of 100HP for instance, or alternatively a more limited option of 100HP, 200HP, 300HP and 500HP (5000HP is right out - might as well make them invincible at this point).

I do not know whether this would be feasible, but that could make everyone happy, myself included.

While I await for a response and see what can be done, I will not play the game as I wish to play it as close to the original vision as possible while of course benefiting from your great job at patching up all the problems that plagued the official versions of the game.

Cheers!

[Frank Sapone]

Hi,

The sidekicks should not be invincible (with glowing eyes in the HUD) on Normal. If they are, this is a legitimate bug.

To get the sidekicks to have 100hp health, simply rename aidata.bak to aidata.vsc (note the VSC NOT CSV) and this will give them 100hp instead.

If you read the PDF there are CVAR optinos for disabling some of these new features.

sv_sidekick_friendly_fire -- set to 1. sv_sidekick_regen_hp -- set to 0.

Do that and the aidata.vsc file swap and start a new game. They will then functino the same as before.

[Frank Sapone]

We also have in the TODO to tweak the default health. Personally, I feel 100 is too low for the average user. The AI is still in a poor state, and it may never be resolved in a meaningful way without stripping it out entirely. This is a huge task, not for one man and a few community members to achieve. With that said, I think the HP would be better suited to a range somewhere from 200-500hp for sidekicks but we have not spent time tweaking the balance for that yet.

I do agree on adding options the new game menu so you can play it as original as possible, but as stated before the readme.pdf lists all these new CVAR options. I specifically made any new game play enhancements CVAR options on purpose for people who want the game original as possible.

[Frank Sapone]

Also, what version of 1.3 are you playing? There are current testing builds that have a huge amount of change fixes. There are some slightly older "nightly" builds here: https://bitbucket.org/daikatana13/daikatana/downloads/. If you are on the March build, I believe that did have a legitimate bug of sidekicks being invincible on medium difficulty. I just checked the current build from today that I compiled and they are not invincible on medium skill.

[Sat42]

Hi Frank,

Thank you for the detailed reply! I admit I didn't see the CVAR options before and would like to take advantage of them - I just don't know how to use them to be perfectly honest - could you please elaborate a bit on how to make use of them? (I suppose it's not just about using console commands, but making config files, yes? but then how many parameters do I need to specify in the file? sorry for the ignorance)

About the version I have: indeed, it was the full March build, so I just downloaded and installed the DK_EXE_092918_SLIM_x64.EXE (just that and nothing else, hopefully that's fine) so now I have the late September build with the ReadMe dated 093018. Seems Wyndrax was fixed which ought to be celebrated! However, just in the main menu, I noticed a couple of things: the ability to chose between 22, 44 and 48 KHz is gone (I had chosen 48 KHz in the March build, presumably that is preserved and surround seems to work; you can still chose between MP3 - which is what I have, since it's default and know not if the rest is better - OGG, WAV etc.), and the option to have sidekick chatter - which I had previously set ON - seems to revert back to OFF if I launch the game, don't go farther than the main menus, and quit (if I start a new game, start playing then quit, then the sidekick chatter ON state is preserved); all other parameters are preserved even if I don't go farther then the main menu. Also, the game launches much faster than with the March build.

I will remember to change aidata.bak to aidata.vsc, thank you! Just need to figure out how to utilise the new CVAR options...

P.S.: never noticed before that the fat driver at the start of the game has a modeled mouth (just a small slit really)! maybe they had intended to make facial animations at some point...

[Frank Sapone]

The sidekick chatter bug is fixed in a (currently unreleased) build.

Sound options are gone because OpenAL does not support this directly. It will use what your OS has it set to. Miles is used on 32-bit as a legacy option for Win9x machines (yes this still works on legacy hardware) but OpenAL is recommended.

I can compile a new build for you and link it to you here if you'd like.

[Sat42]

Good to know.

Yes that would be great if you can provide a new build here, thanks!

[Frank Sapone]

Before you start a new game in the console type

/sv_sidekick_regen_hp 0
/sv_sidekick_friendly_fire 1

then start your new game.

These CVAR commands will be saved into the savegame so you only need to do this once when starting new game.

You are right about the options though, I will look into adding these as new options before the end of the year to make it easier to set them.

I just uploaded a new build, this will break your saves (sorry!) so start a new game: https://bitbucket.org/daikatana13/daikatana/downloads/DK_EXE_112818_SLIM_TEST_x64.EXE

I am currently working on a new build that has a lot of bug fixes (even beyond the 093018 build that is available) in time for a christmas release so save games may break compatibility in the test builds, this is to be expected.

[Sat42]

That's all good, thanks a lot for all the help and dedication, Frank!! Will download the new build ASAP!

Cheers :)

[Sat42]

Hello again!

So far I haven't had time to play much beyond testing the menus and first levels, all good from what I can see. I might wait for the Christmas holidays to really get going with the playthrough, hopeful as I am about that Xmas release you mentioned! Just one more question related to the "vanilla" experience in 1.3: going through the notes in the ReadMe again, I see that there is (under Single Player) an "increased trigger_changelevel required sidekick proximity from 150 to 512" - can I have the original 150 sidekick proximity for this trigger_changelevel? (heh, maybe make this another adjustable parameter in the menus? which would include the original value of 150 units of course) You must be laughing at this point, I know I am picky about having the fixed-but-as-close-to-the-original-vision experience!

Looking forward to that new build for the Christmas release! Cheers, Simon

[Frank Sapone]

/sv_sidekick_exit_range should be what you're looking for.

Frank

[Sat42]

Happy New Year Frank!

My thanks for the info regarding the sidekick exit range CVAR, I just updated Daikatana to the latest 1.3 build (so v.23.12.2018), so now I am excited because with the latest awesome update and all the info you provided earlier I can now start my fixed-but-faithful-to-the-original-vision full playthrough of the game! I have high hopes that in these conditions, the game will actually be good :) I will write a review in time.

I noticed the latest 1.3 build still lacks the suggested added options in the menu, I imagine that will have to wait - for now, I will (within the next few hours) post all the useful info you provided here on Daikatana's GOG forum so that other players interested in the fixed vanilla experience can easily get going - and of course I'll advertise the latest build at the same time.

Again thank you for all the hard work!

Cheers, Simon

[Frank Sapone]

Oh yes, you are right. I forgot about adding the CVARs to the options menu. It was a busy month with doing a lot of testing to get that build ready for release.

Frank

[Sat42]

Hi again,

I have posted on Daikatana's GOG forum. Before I open another thread for a potential bug here, I wanted to ask is it normal that on the Samurai setting there is no Roboskeet squad attacking after running across the bridge before it explodes in E1M1b? The solitary Thunderskeet is still there at least, but it doesn't move from atop the fortress until I provoke it. Note that the doors from where the Roboskeet are supposed to come out still open.

Simon

EDIT: seems it was a bug - I restarted from the beginning on both Samurai and Shogun and the normal scenario of the Roboskeet squad attacking after running across the bridge before it explodes in E1M1b (with the Thunderskeet attacking too) occurred without a hitch!

I don't know why that scripted sequence only partially worked the first time, but I can say that I did save my game manually before the fight on that first playthrough - and when I failed to see the bridge getting destroyed by the lasers (because I was looking in front of me) I actually reloaded to enjoy the spectacle but I remembered thinking something was missing - and indeed the Roboskeet squad never came, even after repeated reloads. Starting a new game (and not saving/reloading anywhere until the next level) solved the issue.

My playthrough continues!

[Frank Sapone]

Yes, it's well known that saving during that sequence can potentially break it. We haven't fixed that one yet. It's always been that way.

The save game system is fundamentally broken in many ways. Restoring save is the same way. Enemies don't remember their goal/task so they won't care about you during a restore until you shoot at them. When that happens they "alert" other enemies near by so you usually don't notice it. Not sure if/when I'll ever fix that as it's a lot of invasive work to fix it that may potentially break other things.

[Sat42]

Good to know! And no worries I understand. It's amazing when one thinks about it, meanwhile Deus Ex has a great saving system which takes everything into account, anyplace anytime!

[Sat42]

Hi Frank,

I thought you might like some feedback: currently playing the Plague Village mission, so far the game has been more enjoyable than I dared hope - with latest 1.3 patch and original settings for AI sidekicks (100HP, no health regeneration, friendly fire, and sidekick exit range of 150 units), I think episode 1 overall is good no more no less (for your info I consider Quake as a whole to be good, and Unreal as a whole to be very good), and episode 2 is somewhere between very good and excellent (Acropolis is nothing short of excellent); hardly any bugs, got a crash once or twice in the first episode, Mikiko was truly problematic only once in one area of the first level of Vault, and yeah overall the game is fairly challenging on Normal but never very hard. If this had been the state of the game at release, it would have made a substantial difference.

Cheers!

Simon

[Frank Sapone]

Thanks Simon,

It's really nice to hear some positive feedback from real players. I'm sorry to hear you had a crash. Do you remember when/where? I try to test everything many times, but it's the nature of programming that you will always miss something that other people find. :)

Frank

[Sat42]

Hey,

I can say more! Just finished Wyndrax Tower, congrats on getting rid of the (notorious, since I read about it before ever playing this!) game breaking bug here, I was totally being liberal with saving and reloading and the sequence with Wyndrax (though sometimes clunky) always worked - well except, after 10 or so repeated tries to test stuff (first time Wyndrax led me outside as the designer intended, but later I discovered I could destroy Wyndrax before he gets to open the secret passage for example, not a problem since I can open doors myself), I did get that issue where he gets stuck on that staircase leading to the balcony within the castle near the starting point - and he's invulnerable for some reason, so that's a mandatory reload (only happens if you hide on the upper level of the circular chamber after he notices you and let him escape the circular chamber as he tries to get to you, even then sometimes he doesn't get stuck and manages to get up onto the balcony - in my case he attacked Superfly whom I had left there - and sometimes he gets stuck but you can free him by attacking him and then the chase continues)! Seeing as saving and (re)loading works, it's OK and like I said I had to test a lot for this to happen, my first experience was fine. I will try to say what happened on the couple or so occasions when the game crashed:

• first time in Processing, saved in that small room with stairway before the big shipping area (last big area before end of mission): I saved, and loading the save would only work once I quit the game and started it again, and would not load repeatedly during the same session - sorry no log, just remember seeing something about overflow OpenAL or something - another save just after in the big area had no issues, so I then simply discarded the problematic one.
• then I was at the end of Ice Lab, wanted to return to level 2 to get a secret I had missed, I could not reload level 2 properly after going through level 3! Game just froze, so ended up using an older save from before going into level 3, all good in the end.
• pretty sure a crash happened once in episode 2 but can't remember where - it did not occur again, was during a map transition with Mikiko, frankly I was just eager to get back to playing.
• also, I chose "missing sounds" for my playthrough and had two areas where I can remember the message "can't find sound file xxx" or something to that effect popping up: when Mikiko falls to the floor after the stasis field is deactivated in the cinematic, and when Superfly enters the outdoors after exiting Wyndrax Tower.

That's all for now! Wyndrax Tower falls short of being excellent but it's still one of the better missions!

[Frank Sapone]

Yeah, to be fair there hasn't been a lot of QA in regards to back tracking for secrets on my end. Usually when we play through it for testing we just blaze through get 100%. I'll have to give it another run with your play style.

If you do get save files that cause a crash every time just zip them and send them here and I'll try to analyze them.

Thanks again and yes Wyndrax isn't perfect but it's mile better than it was that's for sure! Big credit to caedes for that one.

Frank

[Sat42]

Hi Frank!

I finished Daikatana last night! Episode 3 overall is very good, and Episode 4 overall is somewhere between good and very good - the last mission is very good and fittingly, the hardest of the game - which is to say it's hard no more no less (several mandatory reloads, finally an actually challenging boss fight! also the platforming sequences). Superfly was never truly problematic, Mikiko only twice over the course of the game: that first time previously mentioned in one area of Vault, and a second time in one area on the second level of Mishima Labs - I really had to babysit her in those two cases. No more crashes since last time, and so nothing else notable on the bug side of things - only a few rare little minor issues like occasionally a cinematic not running properly (I just reload the last save in that case), or having the two sidekicks sometimes getting in the way of each other when following you so you have to ask one to wait, bring one up the ladder, then call the other, etc.

Final verdict: -

As a whole, Daikatana 1.3 is actually somewhere between good and very good - and closer to very good (or between 75 and 80 percent if I must rate it like this), which is to say just a small step behind Unreal (1998), and really the one easily identifiable thing that keeps it from being very good overall is the enemy AI which really is sub-par in general (it is merely acceptable in Episodes 2 & 3, where enemies can usually navigate beyond their starting area to track you down, but in Episodes 1 & 4 that ability is severely restricted to the point where it constitutes the exception; also enemies are almost always just standing guard in places until they spot you; in Mishima Labs levels 2 & 3, some enemies are even brain dead and will only react once they receive damage - when not destroyed in one strike). Sidekick AI is now good: I usually had my sidekick(s) follow me and they are fairly useful (especially for quickly dispatching small, hard-to-hit targets, or during the occasional big battle - it's like having another weapon, an automatic one - and this is true for the original sidekick AI settings let me remind you, so yeah they are vulnerable like you before you level up but on the Samurai setting, they very rarely get killed, like about half a dozen times in total - and it always felt fair, except that one time in Crematorium when Superfly died under the closing hangar door lol - not the only time a sidekick got caught in a closing door, but on the few other occasions the doors didn't crush him/her; by the way I also died once under a closing blast door, that was in Sewer System :) sidekicks never fell to their deaths on a first playthrough, I just saw it happen on two separate occasions when I was testing things in tricky platforming circumstances, to see how careless one could get). Friendly fire means I sometimes took hits from my allies but it was again rare - think coop and you flank your enemies in order to give your sidekicks room to shoot - and only once was it actually significant given the damage over HP/armor ratio (that was in Mishima Labs level 3), but I was able to continue nonetheless (they rarely shot each other too, and rarely got shot by me but in both cases it never was a big deal except once when I accidentally hacked Mikiko with the Daikatana and killed her lol). So sidekicks are fine, but not as impactful as they were clearly meant to be as while they are useful in general, they really are just another weapon option and I can't say there was a single level that would have been harder in any significant way had my sidekick(s) not been with me (again, on the Normal difficulty setting), and rarely (see those two problematic moments with Mikiko, or when Superfly is just carrying Mikiko and you're escorting them) their presence actually made things a bit more difficult (thanks 1.3 for this being rare apparently!) - but there is one notable exception: the best mission of the game, Acropolis, has one mandatory puzzle which actually requires cooperating with your sidekick (I take it you changed the way this puzzle originally works for those who play without sidekicks right?), making the sidekick actually indispensable to the gameplay as it should be (and not just indispensable to the story). This is the kind of thing I was hoping to see, and I am so happy it happened at least ONCE because frankly, after all that marketing around the AI sidekick feature, the funny thing is that the game actually underutilises the gameplay possibilities offered by the sidekicks: now I know this is probably due to how much trouble they ran into when trying to implement this feature within the Quake 2 engine, but honestly it's not hard to imagine various cool scenarios where your allies are indispensable - from puzzle solving as in the aforementioned case, to the defence of a MacGuffin for example where your allies hold off waves of enemies while you go round a perimeter activating stuff, occasionally throwing down a weapon/ammo/healthpack picked up from your perched position to them so they can keep defending the spot until you're done, etc.!
Graphically, the game overall looks somewhere between good and very good (and closer to very good, just like Unreal generally, definitely better than Quake 2) but while we all know that the character models were behind the times for the year 2000 (in terms of modelling finesse and animation-wise - no facial animations!), the environments themselves - at their best, such as in Icelab, most Greek and Norse levels, and places like Mishima Labs - can actually look very good (like in Unreal Tournament or indeed Deus Ex). Music is generally very good! (but what tracks did Will Nevins compose? since he and Neuvo are the only ones being credited despite well-known contributions by Loconto - due to having left before the end) Variety (weapons, textures, enemies, sounds, art assets in general including sky boxes) and level design (style, art direction) are the game's greatest strengths!

Story is average: it had a lot of (unintentionally) silly moments but the ending is actually good (smart and emotional) and saves the story!

Again thank you for patch 1.3 which has allowed me to enjoy the game as close to the original vision as possible!

I would also like to ask a couple of questions: - any SP maps by the community? are such contributions easy to launch? - is there info somewhere about who made what level or mission? (I suppose it's possible that a multi-level mission could have been made by more than one person) I tried looking for info (remember how it was easily displayed in games like Quake and Unreal) but couldn't find any.

Cheers! Simon

[Frank Sapone]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the kind words and glad you enjoyed the play through. The points you raise all good ones. It is true that they features they were advertising even as far back as 1997 were never fully developed. There's a variety of reasons to this; but I think the biggest is that the game was made by people with no professional experience. All of the art assets, including models, were completed at various points, but I think most were done before 1999 which is why they don't have facial animations and it does feel a little odd that it was missing. However, they were on such a time crunch just trying to make it a playable game there was simply no time to do it over again to add that feature.

Yes, the Acropolis does require Mikiko and it's still a general problem today. Because the game did not expand on requiring sidekicks for puzzle solving then it becomes confusing to new players when that's the only time that kind of situation appears in the game.

I think the graphics were pretty decent for the time. It's not as great as Q3A but they did expand on Quake 2's renderer and even just the art output is generally more interesting than what Quake 2 and even SiN had to offer. Unfortunately, I think some of the bare/rushed maps (like e1m7b and the final map of the game) don't allow you to fully enjoy it. With that said, I actually like e1m1a and the ugly green lighting. Maybe because green is my favourite colour, can't really say for sure... but I remember seeing that for the first time and thought it looked cool. There wasn't too many shooters at the time trying to experiment with areas beyond generic warehouses.

There are no single player user made maps. It could be done, and there is someone who is working on one now. I don't know when it will be released. Trenchbroom now supports Daikatana map making so hopefully we can see some more interesting maps in a few years.

Daikatana was a cool game when it came out, but it did have a lot of bugs and too many people were caught up in the hype of the development hell. I think if it was released without the hype train in full forced it would've been remembered as interesting experiment in FPS design that was just a little too far ahead of it's time.

Frank

[Sat42]

Thanks for the answer, fair points (and yes I agree e1m1a looks cool, aesthetically, the polluted marsh was brought to life quite effectively) and good to know about Trenchbroom.

If you happen to come across info regarding who made what level, I would still be interested!

Simon

[Frank Sapone]

Regarding who made which level in Daikatana... I've talked to some of the map developers and they said it was a team effort. You would work on a map for a while, then someone else would work on it. Even some people from Anachronox helped out at various points.

[Sat42]

Ah, very interesting! Indeed, both teams were in the Dallas studio. Thanks for the info, this is different from a lot of older - but technologically comparable - FPS titles where a level designer would often be responsible for a whole level.

P.S. speaking of the original buggy release, was v1.0 beatable without cheats? I thought I read somewhere that it wasn't which would be pretty terrible!