Pathfinding Issues?

[JohnO]

Now this is in the ball park, but isn't the action point in the center of the 8 x 8 tile?

[Battlefront.com]

Dirtweasel,

Currently there is no way to "see" the Action Spot grid, however sometimes it is more obvious than others.

The way the system works is that when you plot a Waypoint it registers within the Action Spot you clicked on, not the specific pixel that you clicked on. When the Team gets to that Action Spot it stops and does whatever it thinks it should do based on the circumstances (including user Commands). There is no "lead man" or anything else like that going on in any meaningful way to the player. It's quite simply "go to this Action Spot, then do something".

Now, keep in mind that Squads are not Teams. They are generally two Teams, sometimes three and rarely one (splitting, casualties). When you move a Squad the TacAI moves the Teams along their own paths, not along a common path. This is to make sure that the men don't bunch up. Therefore, when you click on an Action Spot one of the Squad's Teams will go there, the other Team/s will move to adjacent Action Spot/s. The TacAI tries to do this intelligently, and generally does, but sometimes fails.

What I can't tell from a text description is if a "missed" waypoint is a result of Waypoint on the extreme of an Action Spot, an issue related to the TacAI's placement of a Squad's Teams, or a bug of some sort. The testers are currently working on some things right now and I think we have some hints about at least one possible bug. Hopefully we'll have that narrowed down soon.

As for the gravity idea... it's not stupid, but it probably wouldn't be optimal. The problem is that sometimes you want the guys to move perpendicular to something, other times you want them to move parallel. It's extremely difficult to say exactly which way is the optimal way. For the most part, however, I'd say that moving abreast is the best thing for soldiers to do in most situations, which is why the TacAI is coded to work that way now. As I said, this would be good for us to improve upon though.

The perfection thing... good, I'm glad to hear that you're just looking for excellence. That's what we're looking for too, which is why we always take indications of a pathing problem seriously. However, some people do expect perfection even if they say they don't. That is one of the things that sucks the most about pathing from everybody's perspective. A bad path decision that results in something negative (like casualties) is something nobody likes to see, whether it happens once every 100 moves or once in 100 games. So while I understand the frustration of that I ask that people understand that there is as much frustration on our part. Pathing is probably one of the worst tasks any game programmer can be asked to do

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

JohnO,

For the most part an Action Spot is a 8x8 tile and vice versa. At least most of the time. Buildings are an exception as well as the Action Spots they sit on. In those cases the Buildings have one special Action Spot for each floor. For the surrounding terrain that have a building sitting on it the Action Spot is whatever the non-building terrain is.

Steve