Pathfinding

[RCIX]

What are your examples of bad pathfinding? So maybe if the thread gets big enough we can go email GPG and they have some ideas to fix it...

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I've noticed that experimentals have the bad habit of taking a path through my base that happens to lead them right to my commander. Since EXPs cannot push aside the commander, they get stuck. :(

[Aesir Rising]

Mass Recovery/ Patrol:
I've seen ACUs and engineers on patrol give up. I think it's tied to too many mass piles from dead stuff. Guessing maybe more than 1 pile fits the "go recover that next" criteria and it can't figure out where to go first.

The symptom for engineers is they look like they are wiggling a little bit, and they aren't recovering anything or travelling.

The symptom for ACUs is their top half spins in circles. They are not recovering anything and they are not travelling.

Spawn point base build sequence grid lock:
So each map seems to give 4 Mass spots to feed 2 engineers and 1 ACU. Sometimes, frequent enough to be noticeable, if I order the 3 units to go build things and their intended paths cross, it takes them a while to sort out who should move first. I try to order them all to build their respective MEX or PG or factory where they don't have to cross paths. That seems to work.

The symptom is that units with build orders for structures outside of their ray o' construction don't move close enough to start building.

Patrol Wiggle
Actually, I don't think it's just patrol ordered units...pretty sure I've seen this on move and attack+move. Instead of a unit moving straight towards its next waypoint or destination, it dances to the left and right of the direction of travel. The net effect is that visually it looks silly, and it's overall travel time to its destination is increased.

The symptom is that units are doing the mamba on their way to the next waypoint.

Air-Walking
Found an instance of a really obvious pathing error that seems to be somewhat reproduceable. On the Chasm map, you have those platform spokes pointing outward from your spawn positions. I had, a few times, a group of 25 land units on one spoke, and wanted them to get into a transport I had parked on the next spoke over.

So, I selected the 25 land units and context clicked the Transport. (Forgetting once again, that SC2 transports don't move to do pickups...) So the land units started walking to the transport and before getting very far got stuck on the edge of their spoke, as if trying to take a shortcut walk over the gap to the next spoke where the transport was hovering. I can't get this to happen every time, but I have gotten it to happen twice so far.

The symptom is that the land units hang out on the edge of a precipice that they can't walk across.

[Ric666]

I occasionaly see some unit gets stuck outside their respective factory, especially if there's an engineer assisting it very close to the factory(which I do quite alot so it's protected by the shield).
Not a big problem but it does happen quite often.

[DrSuperGood]

Formations of large air units like the flying factories or soul rippers have problems moving properly as they wobble around getting into formation and move at half speed compaired to just flying to the desternation.

Soultion would be to allow you to toggle formations off for groups of units.

[aleksanderstorm]

Aesir: I see the engineer/ACU reclaim issue, as well, and I had determined it to be if the unit in question is sitting right on top of the wreck to be reclaimed it bugs out like that. Otherwise, the routines work just fine because the target to be reclaimed isn't behind where the reclaim beam starts- At least, I suspect that's part of the reason why they get confused like that.

My own instances... I've seen units maneuver laterally- or indirectly to the intended location, when a more direct route would be more efficient. Such as a unit sent in a West-South-Westerly direction in an open field won't necessarily head directly WSW, it might head West for a bit or Southwest for a bit and then when it's lined up right, it will head the other way and meet the point. I've even seen this with aircraft, and that seriously boggles my mind as to why- I'm expecting them to head directly for the point, not slide off to the side for a good bit and then head straight for it.

[Aesir Rising]

@RCIX, if you have not already done so, please check...

http://soriandev.blogspot.com/2010/03/im-back-baby.html

...and add this topic to that blog if/when you think it's ready. I was about to do so, but I didn't want to steal your internets.

[RCIX]

Oh cool!

Sadly though it looks like he's working on AI and not pathfinding... :(

[Aesir Rising]

Oh cool!

Sadly though it looks like he's working on AI and not pathfinding... :(

Pathfinding is part of AI -- I'm not being pedantic. That doesn't mean Sorian's focus isn't on combat tactics or some other aspect. But I don't believe a list of pathfinding issues would be out-of-place. Plus, if you don't link it there, I will. :)

[Valor958]

Gotta wonder though... what the heck did the dev team do with all the original programming that had all these issues worked out. I can't recall having these kinds of issues in SC1 or FA and don't know how/why they would decide to scrap the base code that had these issues fixed. I've been told I just don't know how the game dev world works... but I do since I was in college for game design and have friends who actually work in the design world (ie. friend developing stuff for the Unreal series on main team). Even if its not the same dev team they bought rights to the name and all that is the SupCom game now... so they get the game code too so they don't do what they're doing and kill the franchise. The original dev team has to be crying right now over all the crap they've done to what should've been an awesome game.

[RCIX]

The thing is that it is far more efficient and it handles a bunch of other situations much nicer (for instance, you can order 2 large groups of units right at each other and they'll smoothly slide betwen each other whereas otherwise you'd just get a mess, and you can even have large units march through clouds of small ones reasonably well)

Edit: and for this thread, let's stick to pathfinding please :)

[RCIX]

Pathfinding is part of AI -- I'm not being pedantic. That doesn't mean Sorian's focus isn't on combat tactics or some other aspect. But I don't believe a list of pathfinding issues would be out-of-place. Plus, if you don't link it there, I will. :)

Ok, hang on, i'll link it :)

Edit: here ya go (http://soriandev.blogspot.com/2010/03/im-back-baby.html?showComment=1269049359029_AIe9_BFMEpEW7x fh8OQQImAG-iTtonHNiy_YTDlsIPvwmCPd4knnLsCEKj6gmpLMlRwmZF0rgRQ SWUjzktF7kvCa-2KImDVs8dFml9Zoxm5SfCJP3_emasF-MftZzeZbDefbkNPUs1gRwkCXMboKWrMXdTHBcoD5LbqUXzCL1Y XGdKdqeAxtPC_Tw9dzNFT2y6plwmawNpMFDZ0nbn0QJcV8C9e5 vM1LqQ#comment-7219490032189339484).

[JEWNICRON]

One of the things that bugs me is if you build even slightly on top of your ACU by accident he walks 300 feet just to build something right next to him, it's literally quicker to tell him to stop and redo the command.

[killanator]

I havent had to much trouble. Once my army was moving in a straight line and i just had to split them into 2 groups to fix it, and i occasioanly have an engy stuck behind my acu but other then that nothing, basically just minor annoyances

[Palmerific]

I've run into pretty big problems with the Cybran navy. When they sprout legs to walk onto land they will sometimes get stuck on small cliffs and just sort of freak out untill I ctrl-k them or they get killed by something else..I even had a game on setons in which I tried to launch a sneak attack through the little side valley and my entire navy got hung up on the map and got taken out by artillery and gunships.

I've also run into the problem with air moving diagonally to a move point and taking twice as long as they should.

Then there are the little things like how shield units hang towards the back of formations..leaving half of the group unshielded. Granted this can be controlled through control groups and micromanaging formations, it pretty frustrating that Supcom 1 got group formations so right, only to see things so screwy this time around.

And as has been mentioned, sometimes units will get stuck on bottlenecks inside a base and completely forget their move orders.

[Buttons]

I'm just mad that "flowfields" are one of the excuses preventing user created maps.

Tradeoffs are part of life, but usually you try to trade something good for something better, or atleast another good thing. In this case we gave up custom maps in exchange for crappy pathfinding.