Pathfinding

[brokencow]

The first thing I noticed when I installed the new patch was that pathfind was tweaked a little.

I don't really feel like running any tests on this right now but from personal experience heres something I seemed to noticed:

1. If you choose a unit to chase another unit (ex: trow vs trow) it doesn't do as good a job of it as it use to. By that i mean the chasing unit seems to run a very similar route to the unit its following, as aposed to prior patches where it chose the most direct route and always caught up because, well no person was better then the computer. Now it seems like if you try and fake the unit chasing you, you can get it to step multiple times in the wrong direction, get it to turn 90* as well as other interesting moves that can by you a lot of time.

This doesn't just go for trow, but its just the most obvious.

So i guess my question is what (if any) kind of changes did you make to pathfinding?

And if you did the follow up question is what was wrong with the old one? It seems you guys change the pathfinding a lot so I was just curious how you decide what needs to be done.

Sorry if this sounds like a complaint. It isn't ment to be. It's supposed to be constructive criticism at worst. I'm more curious then anything.

Anyone have any other melle things to talk about? Pathfinding? I just felt there needs to be a thread for this. Even if im crazy and all my observations are in my head.

[Baron LeDant]

I think this was tested and it was found to work exactly the same in 1.3

[CIK]

Originally during the 1.4.x phase of things there where attempts to improve path finding that caused any number of issues. The pathfinding got a major cleanup early in the 1.5 development cycle. The TFL portion was separated and we used actual TFL code for vTFL mode and the regular code was cleaned up. From then until 1.5.1 shipped we continued to address various strange path finding bugs that kept showing up in various situations that folks brought to our attention. In the end 1.5.1 shipped with path finding that was very close to 1.3. Because when in doubt we chose to go the 1.3 route. This was helped greatly by Iron's special 1.3 debugging mode where he could turn on 1.3 game play at will to see how units behaved while watching films.

Iron can explain things in better detail since he worked 99% of the pathfinding issues.

[Myrd]

The exact issue you're talking about, particularly chasing units, was brought up late in 1.5's development cycle. So me and Acheron went to make some tests with 1.5 and 1.3 and it turned out it the exact same thing was happening in both: that is, you could sometimes fool the computer by making sharp turns into following your previous direction for a few seconds - and I repeat, the same thing was happening in 1.3. So in fact, nothing was changed with that part of the pathfinding code.

[Orlando the Axe]

I believe (could be wrong) what happened was that it was changed in 1.4.x to be a little smarter on things like that but there was quite a bit of backlash about pathfinding changes etc. so 1.5 (or maybe even earlier?) changed it back to how it was in 1.3. Could be wrong.