Jugz wrote:
I guess I worded that poorly. If I wanted to create an attack dog, and turned a faction into dogs, how would I go about making their AI
It is not possible to program completely new AI behavior logic, the game would basically need a C++ API for that, some kind of plugin system I'd say, but you might be able to come up with something by setting up the dog character, AI, its soldier group or faction in a specific manner.
For instance, if you strip the soldier group from any primary weapons (in a faction xml file and/or related resources files), they will only use stabbing functionality to attack and will charge directly against their detected and chosen enemy. I'd suppose that would be a useful starting point.
Making the soldier group use a different default.ai -like file allows you to configure the AI parameters specific to that soldier group, if needed.
You'll probably need a different default_base.character -like file to alter the running speeds and such for the dog steering model. You can also set up things so that the dog "character" won't talk the way other soldiers do.
Potential problems I'd expect there being includes
* dogs driving vehicles; not sure now if there was a suitable parameter to avoid this, one good enough way might be to keep the dog XP level at 0, which would make them always prefer joining a squad rather than lead one, but if one spawns alone somewhere, it'll be a leader anyway and might end up deciding to use a vehicle before it gets to join a squad..
* dogs climbing up ladders; can't think of a good way around this but maybe there's a way by somehow mutilating it in your custom default_base.character file
One uncharted area with dogs in general would be the animations and the skeleton the character uses. I personally haven't tried to make it suit anything else than humanoids, so not sure how well it will work.