Do bots have a cone of vison in front of them, or do they "see" in 360 degrees?

When the area is not alert, they monitor for enemies with a sector in direction of their facing. In day time the sector is a bit more than 180 degrees, in night time it's much less - don't have the exact values in front of me right now. You can always sneak up on a bot from behind as long as they are not alert.

Day/night also affects the range of the sight sector.

When they are alert, they see 360 degrees.

.............you serious?

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co-owner of NEWA

Yup. If they didn't, you could be shooting at them from behind and they would never realize to get to cover from your bullets. Their sight FOV also works for hearing.

hearing is ok but seeing.to their backs not

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co-owner of NEWA

It won't change, it's fine for RWR. AI's hearing and sight are combined.

The seeing isn't the problem, if they would just have little slower turning times than what they now posses, like you come by walking/kneeling behind corner when they have back at you and you have to get just a step closer to be melee range and AI just does 180 and shoots you at there.

But I am worried that the hearing is tied to view FOV as well, because it means on day time and relaxed state you can almost sneak at them so easily.

That's right. I wanted to keep it possible to do stealth during day time too, it's just a bit harder. It could be made more harder / impossible when there will be camouflage vests or area smoke grenades.

You can also affect your own detectability factor by movement and stance, i.e. running makes you the most detectable, lying prone still makes you the least. That affects the sight/hearing sector each AI uses against you, both range and span.

If we could get the bot FOV data for the different alert states that would be great, since at it's core, the basic gameplay mechanic is line of sight and based on that info.

It has been considered that it would be visualized, but it is a tough one to crack. The almost accurate variation is that all bots would work as shadow casting point lights, so you'd see additional visualized shadows cast by anything that occludes their sight. Too bad that makes a huge performance hit, having to render all the close by objects * nearby bot count to a shadow texture.

Another approach is to add icons and timers and whatnot animation on the bots to indicate how close they are to spotting you, but it feels a bit cheap as an idea, and not sure if it can be well made as the "closeness to spot" can change very quickly; now they see you now they don't.

Instead, I'd work on making it more possible to survive a failed stealth attempt by fleeing and keep stealth more feel based as it is. If you'd survive the fails more, you'd learn the feel quicker.