Rubble and Doors...

[c3k]

Gents,

I seem to have learned something new about this game. I'm advancing or hunting my squads into buildings. Using the various lessons learned on this forum, I plot movement commands up to a doorway, then place another one inside the building. That has really cut down on the number of times my guys run mindlessly through the village backyards.

However, I've just had two squads ignore these commands and instead run around their respective buildings and use the wrong door. I think I know why.

One building had the roof collapse so it had internal rubble. It was closest to the door I wanted to use. Perhaps the door was blocked by the rubble?

The other building had a small wall collapsed in front of the door, with a depiction of rubble in front of the door. Again, my guys ignored that door and ran around the building. Was this door blocked by rubble?

Has anyone else seen this behavior? (Kudos to BF.C if the level of detail is this tight. Amazing.)

Of course, this behavior took me by surprise. Would there be any way to code doorways to APPEAR broken if they are blocked? A collapsed beam or splintered door effect would be nice. Something to alert the player.

Thanks,

Ken

[Battlefront.com]

Yes, that stuff does matter. As does "silly" placement by the scenario designer. What I mean by that is sometimes the designer doesn't pay attention to where the doors are and blocks them with something, like another building without a door on that side or a Tall Wall. These sorts of things tell the TacAI what it should, and that is "there is a door there, but it can't be used. Find another way". The problem is that the player doesn't see the difference and thinks there is a bug of some sort.

Charles has fixed a couple of these issues already, and there is another one in v1.08, but there is no blanket fix for this. For example, two adjacent buildings with only one wall with a door, should probably just be treated as both walls having a door. That's the way the code works now. In another instance the designer should be prevented from making certain terrain combos without first removing a door. I think Charles just implemented something like that for scenarios where Tall Walls are placed directly against doors (at least I think his fix is to prevent it in the Editor).

As someone pointed out earlier; one downside of all these details is... well... all the details

Steve

[c3k]

Steve,

Thanks. Again, the level of detail is amazing.

Regards,

Ken

[c3k]

Resurrected for the HOPE, not the NEED, that blocked doors somehow get SHOWN to the player. A red "x" would suffice, but I'm sure something a bit more, err, flavorful could be devised.

Any chance of inclusion in a future patch/module/family/epoch?

Thanks,

Ken

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I thought this issue had already been resolved?

[akd]

Yes, that stuff does matter. As does "silly" placement by the scenario designer. What I mean by that is sometimes the designer doesn't pay attention to where the doors are and blocks them with something, like another building without a door on that side or a Tall Wall. These sorts of things tell the TacAI what it should, and that is "there is a door there, but it can't be used. Find another way". The problem is that the player doesn't see the difference and thinks there is a bug of some sort.

Charles has fixed a couple of these issues already, and there is another one in v1.08, but there is no blanket fix for this. For example, two adjacent buildings with only one wall with a door, should probably just be treated as both walls having a door. That's the way the code works now. In another instance the designer should be prevented from making certain terrain combos without first removing a door. I think Charles just implemented something like that for scenarios where Tall Walls are placed directly against doors (at least I think his fix is to prevent it in the Editor).

Cool, but please don't prevent tall walls from overlapping building walls without doors. This is actually quite handy for making structures with "thick" walls and Afghan type compounds. Also, would this prevent walls from overlapping any part of the side of the building that has a door, or only if the actual door location would be blocked?

[hoolaman]

Rubble has never blocked any movement, ever, in any version of the game. So there is no such thing as a blocked door except in the cases Steve mentioned where the map-maker does something silly, but even then it should be blindingly obvious.

There was a bug where a certain configuration of corner wall tiles stopped troops going through a gap in one scenario Thread. The rubble was coincidental.

[Chops]

Rubble has never blocked any movement, ever, in any version of the game. So there is no such thing as a blocked door except in the cases Steve mentioned where the map-maker does something silly, but even then it should be blindingly obvious.

There was a bug where a certain configuration of corner wall tiles stopped troops going through a gap in one scenario Thread. The rubble was coincidental.

Really? Does this apply to vehicles as well? I can recall at least two occasions where wall rubble blocked vehicle movement.

[Ryujin]

Rubbled walls don't block movement in my experience, even for vehicles. Make sure you made a wide enough hole in the wall if you're trying to drive through. However, I don't think you can enter a floor that had a roof fall in on it (you'll see rubble inside that level of the building, usually if it's multi story, any lower floors should be usable, if you don't see any rubble, the doors can't be blocked.

On a slightly related note, will climbing through windows ever be added? Might be a bit tricky interface wise as you'd need a command to specify how to enter, but it would come in handy a lot (you'd just be much more vulnerable entering, with something like a slower version of the jump over wall animation coming through the window).

[hoolaman]

Really? Does this apply to vehicles as well? I can recall at least two occasions where wall rubble blocked vehicle movement.

I was referring to infantry, sorry I didn't make that clear. I guess I probably shouldn't have said so many never evers

But yes I'm sure rubbled walls, the kind that are created when you blow up a section in the game, don't block vehicles. I'm not sure about the rubble flavour objects, flavour objects can be a block for vehicle pathing so that might be what you saw.

[c3k]

Gents, I've just completed a test. It seems that new or old rubble - from adjacent buildings - does NOT block building doors. But there is a twist.

In the test I created scenario-built rubble (all rubble refers to building rubble, NOT walls) adjacent to building doorways. Such that, XB where X is rubble and B is a building with a door facing the rubble.

Additionally, I created building clusters, AB, where A and B are buildings sharing a wall with doorways between them. Then, I area-fired upon A until it rubbled, leaving the same situation as XB, above. The difference being the newly created rubble was made IN scenario.

The results were NOT what I expected.

With XB, preset rubble, the doorways facing the rubble APPEARED normal. Infantry was able to move through the rubble and enter the buildings THROUGH the doorways. So, appearance and operation were linked. (Earlier versions of the game did NOT allow movement through such a door as far as I'd remembered. Shrug. It does now.)

Next, with AB, there were some difficulties. The need was to rubble A, but leave all of B intact. In several cases, the rubbling of A led to the collapse of the adjacent wall from building B. However, I was able to get the result I wanted. I had to use a multi-level, large B structure and single level, small A structure, and then area fire on A.

Here's the oddity; in order to create the rubble adjacent to a building, I used this configuration:

BA1

BA2

Where B was a single building and A was two smaller, separate buildings. B's door was setup off-center: ----------D-- A's were centered: ---D---|---D---

When both A's were destroyed, the ONLY visible door was the one on building B. Yet, infantry would enter the intact wall THROUGH the nonexistant door which used to be from either building A.

This did NOT occur with preset rubble.

I ran this test 12 times. Some lives were lost to get this data. Sorry men. Range safety rules shouldn't be broken. My bad.

Game breaker? Hell no. But, the "fudge" to create doors between adjacent buildings has visible consequences. (I'm referring to the coding which allows a doorway to be created if EITHER building has a door at that location. The other may have a solid wall, but if a doorway exists in either side, it exists on BOTH. Visually, this is not shown. It is up to the scenario creator to sort it out visually.)

Ken

[hoolaman]

Huh?

If I understand you, and I'm not sure I do, you purposely created misaligned doors, then went to great lengths to get a situation where one wall was not destroyed, and the worst that happened was the troops went through a slightly offset doorway?

Remember the "scenario designer doing something silly" concept?

[c3k]

Perhaps you misunderstood me. I did not go through GREAT lengths to create misaligned doors. I merely placed two buildings adjacent to one another. The code creates misaligned doors, but doesn't show them. Then, one one building takes damage, the INVISIBLE door remaining on the intact building, can be used. In fact, it WILL be used despite the player's wishes, unless he creates orders and pathing to avoid the INVISIBLE door.

This occurs if the intact wall has NO doors. It is not just an issue of an available door on the left, but troops go through the right.

Like I said, this is not any kind of game breaker. I'd label it "undocumented feature" with no implication of being a bug. It is a "feature" that doors are created between buildings if either one or the other has a door. If both have a door, which takes priority? If only one has a door, then what? If one is rubbled, what happens? Oh, I just tested and answered that.

In the hopes of BF.C creating a "tighter" coding between what is seen and what is in the code, I'd hope that future games would SHOW the created doors. That way, when the scenario designer creates a door, it would be VISIBLE on BOTH walls. In game, it would show where troops could go. Right now, that's not true.

Are there more important things for BF.C to code? Of course. (And not just FLARES!)

Regards,

Ken