Moving in Buildings

[c3k]

Gents,

One of the biggest tweaks I'd like to see involves pathing within buildings.

Currently, and recurringly, my men don't seem to follow the directions I give...

The latest situation (of many) involved a squad in Level 2 of one building, directly adjacent to another building. You know, they share a wall. So, since I never know if the walls can be passed, I order BLAST from one to the other.

What happened?

I'm glad you asked.

They BLASTED all right. The hole was impressive. Then they ran downstairs, through the wall (I guess they could pass through it afterall), then run upstairs to the destination.

This type of in-building behavior is all too common.

Another situation: I had two squads in a two level building. It was constructed of 4 separate buildings adjoining each other. Like this: XXXX

One squad was in Level 1, the other in Level 2. I ordered them to ASSAULT each building, in order, from west to east. The Level 1 guys did so. Cool. The Level 2 guys had to go up on the roof for each succeeding assault. Uncool. I could not see any difference in the internal walls between the two levels.

Some sort of feedback is missing. To me, the player, there are two identical environments. Yet, identical orders yield dissimilar results. Obviously, there are internal differences in the environments. Why aren't they visible in the game?

My suggestion is simple: when a wall is impassable, have the view of that wall show it as a black bar. Such as X|X|X|X between successive buildings. Or a red bar. Or something more artistic, yet visible to the player. (This assumes on-the-fly calculations of movement paths is impossible.)

I'm aware of the argument that knowing if there's a passage between walls before getting there gives the player too much omniscience (can you be too omniscient?). However, BLASTING from one to another ought to work.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Ken

[missinginreality]

c3K - I've done a heap of tests with moving between two buildings; there's a lengthy diatribe about it somewhere on the forums regarding what I preceived as an invisible "code gap" between buildings when blasting above ground level. The situation was as you described and results were the same too.Seems like above ground level movement without an implicit door/door connection between the two would cause this behaviour, unless it was on the roof. Similarly this was also evident with two buildings side by side connected by open balconies - what is a visible route is actually "invisible"to the pathing. This maybe what is happening in the wall-blast scenario. As the buildings themselves originally are not connected because of the wall/wall arrangement, blasting this wall/wall still leaves the gap between the buildings intact.

[Thomm]

That blast-level-2-but-move-over-roofs issue is known and has already been fixed for 1.10, if I recall correctly.

Best regards,

Thomm

[c3k]

Excellent....if you recall correctly!