@Fenix pazi ovo, sve sto sam ovdje pretpostavio, zapravo i je tako sto se tice A-Life 1.0. Majke mi bacam se i ove vode, idem vidjeti koliko dobro mogu zagrebati u AI skriptiranje i development.
The AI map is an area filled with AI nodes, it controls and restricts the npcs and creatures on-line (and off-line) movement on the level.
In stalker games (x-ray engine) there are two types of entities: either something is on-line or off-line. If an entity is on-line, it means it's somewhere around the actor, not further then alife radius. The alife radius/switch distance is in SOC/CS/COP (alife.ltx) by default 150 meters around actor.
Among entities, the npcs and creatures can exist and move only on the AI map (on-line mode) or move along graph points (off-line mode). An npc/monster comes on-line, if it moves in off-line state inside the switch distance - these are the moments when the game hangs up sometimes for seconds, as the engine switches the entities from off-line to on-line. The AI map must be continuous on a single map, because all ai nodes must be accessible from all other ai nodes to allow AI to calculate paths from any point to any point. Separated ai node islands are not allowed (invalid AI map).
You can see on the above picture a big whiteness, which ends at bushes, trees, buildings - no, this is not a badly designed winter mod, this is the selected AI map itself. AI controlled npcs/monsters move exclusively on the ai map, which consists thousands or even millions of ai nodes. Npcs/monsters don't see static objects and don't collide with them, they collide and see only the AI map.
It's somewhere around 3.000.000 - 3.500.000 ai nodes, which is roughly a 1.3 km x 1.3 km sized area filled totally with ai nodes. It depends also from the number of graph points on AI map, for optimised a-life there must be a dense graph point network on the AI map. The memory usage barriers of xrAI won't allow you to make bigger the playable area then around 3 million ai nodes + around ~400 graph points. For best results, compile the level.graph (*ShOC only) or all.spawn (for CS and COP graph) on Windows 7 x64.
Of course it doesn't mean the maximum size of level geometry, it's just the playable area limit.
If an entity becomes off-line, so it goes beyond switch distance, and the engine switches it from on-line to off-line, it disappears from the AI map, and starts to move along graph points. Graph points are designated points, which exist only on the AI map. Graph points appear as spawn objects in a level editor scene, but they don't exist as a spawn object in the game or in the game's all.spawn: xrAI compiler translates the graph points on AI map into game/level vertices (into a graph network). If you would unpack a game.graph with GGtool, you could see, that the number of game vertices are equal with the number of graph points on the AI map.
All off-line entities will move along these level/game vertices on AI map, travels to other maps etc. Graph points are also used to designate a point for spawning the actor after level change from an other map, or link two map to allow for npcs/creatures level to level traveling.
