Sorry but the pathfinding is a disgrace

[Bahger]

I'm on the verge of giving up the SP Campaign after less than one turn of the first mission. Why? Because my units' pathfinding from the embarkation point to the end of the berm is such a disgrace that, in four attempts st the turn, a vehicle, usually a Stryker spotter vehicle, goes up on the berm, skylines himself and gets spanked.

This is a disgrace, guys. I'm sorry, I'm one of your staunchest defenders but how the heck can anybody blame Tom and Bruce for eviscerating an otherwise wonderfully promising game when idiotic stuff like this happens with depressing consistency? And it's not as if the map has a chokepoint here; the approach is wide, well-defined and unhindered by enemy fire yet every time I've played it, a vehicle strays onto the berm. It's pitiful.

[ChrisND]

Umm.. what? I've never had anything go over the berm unless I told it to do so, and I've played it about five times now.

[Battlefront.com]

Weeeeeeeelll I would not say our pathfinding is perfect. However, that Berm thing you're talking about is likely not a bad decision on behalf of the pathing system. I'd be curious to know where you were clicking. To the pathing AI the Berm is nothing more than a piece of raised terrain that can be traveled on. It therefore, quite rightly, thinks it is legitimate terrain to travel on. So you must have done something to indicate you wanted it to go up there, even if you didn't.

Either that or it is a bug. You do know that bugs can be fixed, sometimes rather easily, right? CMBO was patched 12 times, CMBB not quite as much, and CMAK a few times too. I know we had things broken in the game that eclipse a vehicle going in the wrong direction.

And anybody that would give up on an entire game based on less than one turn can't possibly be a supporter. Someone that SUPPORTS someone doesn't cast them aside so easily.

Steve

[Huntarr]

yeah, you need to make sure you set your waypoints thru the gap not across the berm

[Bahger]

Fair enough. I'm supporting the game and will continue to yearn for patches. But once I reverted to savegames and got my forces through the map, destroying all the static tanks and sustaining no losses except for one Stryker which, without orders from me, raced to the compound in a hail mary suicide run, I could not get the vehicles through the bottleneck that is the guarded entrance to the compound. I took needless losses just because the pathfinding glitches created a traffic jam when there shouldn't have been one.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still intrigued by this game. But it's trying my patience. Surely the big no-no of any game is to punish the player, not because his tactics are poor but because the program cannot resolve a simple issue like getting vehicles though an entryway. With all that backing up and reversing and getting themselves killed, it was like a Keystone Kops movie directed by Ridley Scott.

[ChrisND]

Originally posted by Bahger:

Don't get me wrong, I'm still intrigued by this game. But it's trying my patience. Surely the big no-no of any game is to punish the player, not because his tactics are poor but because the program cannot resolve a simple issue like getting vehicles though an entryway. With all that backing up and reversing and getting themselves killed, it was like a Keystone Kops movie directed by Ridley Scott.

I had a problem with that the first time myself, that entrance is definetely a kill zone. My recommendation is to pop smoke and cover it, bring the vehicles through one by one by using the Pause command. Also blowing holes in the compound is probably better and is in fact often SOP fo situations like that.

[Spindry69]

I've had a similar problem with pathfinding. When commanding a vehicle to move a short distance forward iv'e seen them on several occasions move way forward before moving back to where I first commanded them to move too. This often leads to their demise as they move into enemy zones.

[athkatla]

Originally posted by Bahger:

I'm on the verge of giving up the SP Campaign after less than one turn of the first mission.

when idiotic stuff like this happens with depressing consistency?

Hmm, bit of a contradiction in terms there mate. You need to give it more time.

Incidentally, I thought a few times that my vehicles were acting on their own, until I remembered that you have to right click away from the selected unit after giving it orders. If you don't do that you can inadvertently give orders to the last unit you gave orders to instead of to the one you want to give orders to.

[Pandur]

I took needless losses just because the pathfinding glitches created a traffic jam when there shouldn't have been one.

hm, i just have the demo currently and iam turned off by no TCP/ip wego. the demo doesnt have a possibility to really try out the "traffic jams" becouse it just features open terrain, nothing urban.

now i ask, are that the same traffic jams like in CMx1!? where one vehicle goes into another vehicl and so they blob up in a jam!?

if yes, i can life with that, i am master in laying waypoints for marchcoullums, i work that out

[Battlefront.com]

Bahger,

Trust me, I understand the frustration of bad pathing. You have no idea how bad pathing can be until you see the first version fresh from the programmer's compiler

I know what happened. This is something that is really difficult, if not impossible, for a pathfinding system to take into consideration. Rune, when designing that scenario, put "ramps" so you could get an FO or some MGs up on top of the berm if you wanted to. This requires sloping the terrain and not making it a cliff. Nothing can go up cliffs. The majority of the berm is a cliff and therefore the nearest place around it is, in the eyes of the pathing system, up the ramp and down. Now, we Humans know that this puts the vehicle in a really stupid position. But that isn't something the pathing system could possibly be made to understand. So there are two solutions:

1. The designer could have opted to not put the ramps up the berm. This would prevent the pathing AI from going up it, but it would also prevent everything else from gong up it. So this is a decision that has to be made ahead of time and necessarily limits the Blue Player's options.

2. Plot at least one waypoint on your side of the berm near the gap, then plot further waypoints on the other side. That's it

In general the more guidence you give a pathing AI the more likely you are going to get the result you want. The less you give it... well, you just have to live with what it gives you. In the Berm battle it is actually a very bad idea (tactically speaking) to go rushing through the gap, so the better tactical thing woudl be to move to the gap, regroup, and push into it more cautiously than you could using the way I suspect you used.

Anyway, thanks for hanging in there. Just remember, the pathing AI can only examine terrain, not specific threats.

Spindry69,

That's a known issue that popped up at the last minute. We were just tracking it down when our ship date came up and simply wasn't worthy of screwing up the launch. I've got it on our short list of things to look at. IIRC it is related to giving Groups Commannds and to vehicles only. But everything in the last week is a big smudge so I could have that wrong Just know it has been spotted and is in our bug tracking system.

Thanks,

Steve

[-E]

Originally posted by Spindry69:

I've had a similar problem with pathfinding. When commanding a vehicle to move a short distance forward iv'e seen them on several occasions move way forward before moving back to where I first commanded them to move too. This often leads to their demise as they move into enemy zones.

What speed did you tell them to move at? The manual states that the higher the speed, the greater the chance of overrunning the waypoint.

[Battlefront.com]

E,

That's true, but I am sure Spindry69 spotted something that cropped up while we were doing last minute testing on the Demo last week. It certainly doesn't happen all the time, and speed may be a factor (I sound like a State Trooper talking about a car crash!), but I don't think he saw something that was intended. Well, actually I KNOW it isn't intended to have a vehicle overshoot and then drive 180 to get back to the waypoint

Steve

[Steiner14]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Rune, when designing that scenario, put "ramps" so you could get an FO or some MGs up on top of the berm if you wanted to. This requires sloping the terrain and not making it a cliff. Nothing can go up cliffs. The majority of the berm is a cliff and therefore the nearest place around it is, in the eyes of the pathing system, up the ramp and down. Now, we Humans know that this puts the vehicle in a really stupid position. But that isn't something the pathing system could possibly be made to understand. So there are two solutions:

1. The designer could have opted to not put the ramps up the berm. This would prevent the pathing AI from going up it, but it would also prevent everything else from gong up it. So this is a decision that has to be made ahead of time and necessarily limits the Blue Player's options.

Steve,

how about that idea: to give the scenario designer an extra tool, that marks forbidden areas for certain vehicle classes?

But ofcourse I don't know if it is much labour to add an invisible terrain class with such attributes for the AI only.

This idea could even be expanded for infantry units, so that the desinger can decide, which units are allowed to move over certain areas and which units will not!

[Bahger]

Steve, I really appreciate your courteous reply to my slighly testy post. I'm going to give you a detailed AAR here so that you can understand the showstopping nature of the problem. Let me state also that I'm an experienced PC wargamer who understands the universal need to work around the imperfect current state of tac-AI but the point at which workarounds become impractical is when AI behavior is so lobotomised and egregious that it disrupts all immersion in the game.

- The map looks like there is a gap in the berm, but rotate it and suddenly what looks like a gap isn't a gap. Try to send vehicles through it and they will career off along the crest, getting shot up before turning around and coming back. Along the crest, fully skylined. Understand that all this is uncommanded movement.

- Re. the above: I've read my history books about the first day of offensive infantry ops in both the first Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq and I know this much: If you are going to blow a gole in a berm so that a large force of vehicles can launch into defended territory with the maximum firepower available for the offense, the hole has to be big enough to drive tanks though at least two-abreast. If the game cannot accomplish this, then Rune should not have put a hole there. Neither the graphics engibne nor the vehicle AI seem to recognise a hole as a hole.

- Rather than deal with a phantom hole in the berm through which to mount a pincer-like assault on the compound, I decided to drive my task force to the end of the berm and approach from the road. Again, the killer here was uncommanded AI pathfinding. I used "formation move" commands to get the force to the first turn in some semblance of military formation because the shft-left-click command is broken and hangs the game. In four out of four attempts, a vehicle found its way onto the berm when it had not been commanded to go anywhere near there. The Stryker MGS is a particular culprit. In my last attempt at the game, one climbed the berm and the other raced around the edge of the berm and launched a hail mary assault on the compound all by itself, getting shot up at the entrance of the compund when the rest of my force was still keystone kopping its way around the angle between the berm and the road. If it hadn't been so frustrating it would have been funny and give me some credit; I never mouse-clicked a waypoint for that vehicle so far forward of my assaulting force.

- The road has sustained damage and in certain places there is a median. This is fine in theory but the pathfinding is so crude at the moment that my tanks responded to these navigation challenges by doing preposterous things like breaking formation, turning their backs to enemy fire and jamming into each other like bumper cars.

- At my last attempt at the mission (my fifth) I gave up when, having cleared the path to the compound entrance by moving in bounds and having the tanks overwatch the Stryker convoy, I could not get a recon force of two Strykers through the entrance to the compound without the two of them becoming all snarled up with each other like two women in Volkswagen Beetles fighting over a parking space at a shopping mall.

- I always use "Move" and "Quick" movement commands unless the unit is under fire.

Guys, it's awful, I'm sorry to say. I will absolutely persevere because so much commmittment and expertise has gone into the game and one day it might be great. But it's nothing but wishful thinking to believe you can simulate MOUT with such woeful vehicle pathfinding and AI problem resolution that makes a mockery of basic military movement discipline. The goofy, uncommanded movements are just dreadful immersion-killers. It's one thing to accomodate one's tactics to the limitations of current-state AI; I've been doing that for many years in just about every sophisticated PC battlefiled simulation I've played. But when tactical control of the AI collapses into chaos that is beyond even the power of babysitting to resolve, it makes a mockery of the game's tactical intent and destroys all immersion.

I will try the mission again today. I ordered the deluxe edition of the game and look forward to getting the extra materials. I will stay on this board, playing the game if I can face it, and maintaining a polite, constructive tone at all times. But you guys have to know the scale of the problem you have here. The pathfinding is so bad that it makes a mockery of your very design concept itself. If you can fix this, you may have a great game but not until then.

[sage2]

I saw teh same issue with my Stykers going up on to the berm. I had to be very careful to avoid that.

I've also seen similar issues with pathfinding, and have a similar response. The one thing I can recommend is just using very short movement orders. That helps a little.

[MoNuckah]

My problem is with vehicles and infantry moving through gaps in walls. I took 7 turns to get all my strykers to the wall in the first campaign scenario, laid down smoke, and had squad assault the corner building through a gap in the wall.

Instead my guys run around in circles, then make a break for the guarded entrance, the long way, because that 20 foot gap in the wall didn't appear to them for some reason. Half of my squad gets gunned down out in the open, running the opposite direction I tell them.

Thats not good.

I gave them short, simple commands to go through the blasted gap, but they insisted on suicide. Frustrating.

[ July 29, 2007, 10:27 AM: Message edited by: MoNuckah ]

[B00M$LANG]

I have to mention a little thing called TACTICS here.

Why in the world would anyone consciously decide to send troops through a known chokepoint without pounding the sweet crap out of it with 155mm?!

Seriously?! I pounded the crap out of everything that had even an inkling of enemy long before I committed ground forces, and I lost nothing - nobody. I used my M1's to provide 360 coverage around the camp then blasted the crap out of the guard towers and the forward barracks buildings and such, then I did an area mission in the inside of the compound, used my MGS's to create a few wall breaches then support the M1's in coverage, dismounted my AT teamsabout 200m away from the compound to take-out resistance on rooftops and provide antiarmor support, then ran my Strykers up, dismounted my assault forces, and cleared the buildings one floor at a time.

Did this on Veteran setting. Won't even try Elite until I finish the campaign as Vet.

[Thunderbird]

Originally posted by B00M$LANG:

I have to mention a little thing called TACTICS here.

Completely irrelevant here...the OP is talking about a game mechanic, not his play.

[B00M$LANG]

Originally posted by Thunderbird:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by B00M$LANG:

I have to mention a little thing called TACTICS here.

Completely irrelevant here...the OP is talking about a game mechanic, not his play. </font>

[Blackmuzzle]

I've seen Strykers "do the dance" for no reason in particular on wide open terrain, so I can attest that there's something fishy in the pathfinding - or at the very least in the AI movement command system itself.

At the risk of sounding like a smartass, I wrote "Spoonbot" for Tribes so I dare say I know a thing or two about AI and pathfinding

What makes this so frustrating is that it doesn't happen on all maps, heck it's a sporadic problem for me that really does kill the fun because the otherwise the game *is* great.

[Cheeba]

Straying off-topic a bit here, but nice work on Spoonbot, mate. Back when I was on dialup I had loads of fun playing Tribes offline with that, nicely done

[Pinetree]

Originally posted by Blackmuzzle:

I've seen Strykers "do the dance" for no reason in particular on wide open terrain, so I can attest that there's something fishy in the pathfinding - or at the very least in the AI movement command system itself.

Yep, me too.

In the Mout training mission(WeGo mode, elite setting BTW) at the start I sent 3 strykers on parallel diagonals to the left(they should have finished the movement in a line) and one on a diagonal to the right, one of the ordered-left strykers started going right then corrected itself, it then went round the other ordered-left strykers (who by this time were in their line position, sort of) and ended up facing sideways in front of them.

I don't suppose BFC has modelled drunkenness and the driver was having a "way-hey!" moment?

[Bahger]

I tried this mission again last night and one of the standalone battles. Sadly -- because I spent some serious $ on the deluxe edition -- I'm done with this game until they overhaul the pathfinding.

I really admire the Battlefront guys, their concept, most of their execution and their obvious passion for their product. But as I said originally, it's wishful thinking to simulate MOUT with such awful vehicle pathfinding. I'm spending most of my time in this game mouse-clicking my way around corners, babysitting vehicles into cover, figuring out where the "no-go" zones are, stopping them getting tangled up in each other. You shouldn't have to micromanage vehicle pathing in this way. And vehicles must maintain military formation, especially when moving to contact. I'm sorry but they just don't. They wander all over the place and even my active imagination (along with a reserve of goodwill towards this game) cannot excuse this lobotomised vehicle behavior as "fog of war". It's very simple: if a Stryker can drive up an alley in real life because it is, after all, a very mobile concept of offensive urban warfare, and if there are alleys in the maps, I expect to be able to drive it up that alley, place it in cover, dismount my squad and position them towards a threat. I challenge any one of the devs to prove to me that this can be done right now. It cannot because of both appalling pathfinding and anomalies in the design of the sequencing of orders. It gives me no pleasure to say that the way CMSF plays right now is more like having to be a kid pushing a three-wheeled truck around a sandbox than it is being the commander of the most highly mobile, technologically sophisticated company-level strike force in the history of warfare. It's a crying shame.

I think this problem was much less of an issue in WW2 CM titles because the battlefields were less cluttered and speed was not such a tactical issue. However, when fighting assymetrical battles in hostile, built-up terrain, whether city or village, speed is required to gain and keep the initiative. I need to know that if I send a platoon of Strykers there and then have them face that, they will do both, in formation and using exactly the route plotted. This is what we can expect from vehicle pathfinding AI in Steel Beasts, Company of Heroes and even GRAW 2. Instead they get themselves all turned around even when moving to contact and by the time an enemy is spotted, I have to play traffic cop rather than take advantage of a fast and efficient deployment.

It's sad. I've bought and played about a hundred high-quality military-themed games across all genres in the last ten years and I was expecting to hunker down with this title, working my way through the single player campaign and playing PBEMs. I was disappointed to learn that PBEMs were saddled with 14 MB swap files but I understand this to be the consequence of the dev team's genuine technological advancements. However, never have a played an otherwise promising game whose very design concept is so completely sabotaged by one all-important aspect of gameplay, which is the need to recreate precise, orderly and military movement and deployment of vehicles. It's an awful shame and quite possibly nobody's fault but I'd have to side with Tom Chick about the unplayability of the game in its present state. It will stay on my hard drive, unused, until the next patch.

[scottie]

i agree, so far my pathfinding is SOOOOO annoying. Unit move into line of fire when i have spent time waypointing out of harms way !!!

[Deathsai]

It is indeed quite frustrating, when I have a perfectly lined up column of 4 Strykers, I order them on a completely straight path down a completely straight road, and two of them go absolutely insane and drive off the road, get back on, and ruin the integrity of the column, leaving one Stryker far in the lead and 3 others bunched up in the back.

Thank you for implementing psychotic drivers into my vehicles who go ballistic before even coming under enemy fire.