Pathing and how to minimize me pulling out my hair from my already balding scalp

[Hormalakh]

Hi,

 

So one thing that I think the old IE games was missing was that whenever you moved your party, a big part of the pathing issues was that it wasn't clear to the player what path the party was going to take before they took it. My solution to this would be to implement some sort of path line between the character and the destination. Like a small dotted green line on the ground that shows the path that the party or each individual is planning on taking. This way the player knows which path the party intends to take before it becomes too late. If the pathing system fails at guessing what the player wants, then the player can "override" the pathing and shift-click several way points to get their preferred path.

Edited May 17, 2013 by Hormalakh

[Fearabbit]

I agree that manually selecting waypoints would be a good thing. Especially if stealth is implemented in any way, this is crucial. The pathfinding system has no way of knowing if you would like to go a longer route to avoid detection or if you want to take the direct path, and it would be nice to lay out a path beforehand instead of having to do it on-the-fly.

[Aldereth]

No kidding. Pathing is the first thing that come to mind when I see the words "real time". I would argue that I have never been satisfy with any game in this regard. It is the reason why I prefer turn base

[Ffordesoon]

It's always bizarre to me that very few developers seem to realize just how important fun, quick, easy, and precise movement is to a game. There are genres where it's more important, of course; a console platformer is going to live or die on the quality of its movement, whereas a cRPG controlled with a mouse will only seem somewhat less fun. But even in a cRPG, it's important. The whole Diablo series succeeded on the merit of its movement, whereas some cRPGs are basically unplayable for the neophyte these days because of how poorly their movement was designed. Oddly, this seems to have afflicted 90's cRPGs in particular. Tile-based games like Wasteland have swung back around to playable status, whereas Fallout's more granular movement now feels overly herky-jerky and tedious.

 

If the Kickstarter-funded cRPG developers should apply one thing from their time working on what a Codexer would derisively call "console shooters," it's the understanding of what makes for enjoyable movement those games inculcated within them.

 

(I can already picture the response to this post. It is a credit either to my confidence or my stupidity that I have chosen to post this anyway. )

[Lephys]

I'd just like to re-pitch my Drag-And-Draw movement command-issuing idea here. It would be extremely simple, as far as control/UI goes. Perhaps a modifier key, like ALT, or whatever you want to bind it to, OR just a simple "dragging a held click initiates this," if nothing else in the game's controls requires you to click and drag. AND, it could work straight into the waypoint system. Set a waypoint, then draw a specific path around a tree, then set another waypoint. The paths will always connect between waypoints, etc.

 

Want your character to keep right of this tree, then left of that boulder, then hug the cliff face for 20 feet, then flank an enemy? Just click-and-drag a line around the tree, then around the boulder, and over to the cliff, let go (setting a waypoint at the end of that precise path), then just shift-click (or whatever adds waypoints) 20 feet down along the cliff face, creating a waypoint there and automatically connecting it with the previous waypoint with a straight line, then click-drag to draw a path around the desired target to the desired point for the desired angle of approach.

 

It just seems like limiting movements to straight lines is a bit primitive in the year 2013. *Shrug*

 

And, sure, the ability to draw a specific path through that corridor of traps only saves you like 5 seconds of trouble as opposed to trying to use straight-line waypoints only, but just imagine how many times, total, you'll be issuing precise movement commands throughout the entire game. That all adds up.

 

I know this was used for the pathing of walls and roads in Black And White 2, and I've seen it used for movement in several flash games, so I don't suspect it's crazily difficult to implement.

Edited May 18, 2013 by Lephys

[Chippy]

I couldn't work out the pathfinding pattern for my hair loss either, so I had hair transplant surgery, it worked out at £2 a hair which was £8000for a loss at the temples and about 20mm receding from the forehead...you just have to plan the waypoints for where the hair starts fall out about a year ahead and plan accordingly. And try to pull it out from the back of your head during fits of rage - it grows back quickly there.

 

A colleague suggested a medi-gel type chemical injected into the scalp, but I asked if it blocked DHT from an abundance of testosterone and had dumbed down side effects such "drooping Hanar" and referring to yourself in the third person as "this one" during hardcore RPG sessions, and he didn't seem to know what I was talking about...

 

Ok, I might get banned. Yes - agree with the pathfinding suggestions and the party ai toggles found in NWN2, so I can plot a path and toggle a party member stay hidden and passive along the way.

 

...Maybe those dots he leaves could be little clumps of hair

Edited May 19, 2013 by Chippy

[ManifestedISO]

^^ Quiet resentment: seriously, medi-gel does nothing for follicle genophage. This one knows it to be certain. 

 

I have no doubt there will be zero pathing problems in P:E. The game is being developed by people who encounter real-life, unavoidable pathing problems around the I5 and 405 corridors.

[Sensuki]

I am okay with the ability to be able to shift click waypoints or something but when normally moving I don't want to see any lines on the environment as such. I don't even think waypointing is that necessary.

[Lephys]

I don't even think waypointing is that necessary.

You don't think that, in a tactical-combat-laden RPG, being able to send a character from point A to point B by any other means than via straight line is "that necessary."? I'll agree that it isn't literally necessary, as you can move people in a more complex fashion with only simple, direct movement commands to deal with. But... is it really necessary to deal with such restraints with something as simple as "I want you to go on the other side of this pit of spikes, but I want you to go around the pit of spikes rather than running into it"? As opposed to, "Okay, I want you to first go over here, and I'll just twiddle my thumbs for 7 seconds while you make your way far enough so that a clear path to my intended destination for you actually opens up. Then, I'll issue you yet a second movement command, after having waited for your position to change, to get you where I want you to go. Now, I'll do that with 5 other people, while we're all dying to swords and sorcery. u_u"

[Sensuki]

Didn't need it in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale so yes.

 

Did I say I am against it? No.

I am against action bars though and being able to queue abilities. Shift clicking to a max or two abilities wouldn't be too bad, but anything more feels lazy and more of a popamole consolized feature.

 

Josh said something about wanting the combat in P:E to require more inputs - swapping weapons, ability use, repositioning etc etc

I can micro 6 characters and followers/summons no problem, actually looking forward to it. I'm a bit of a combatfag not a storyfag so

Edited May 21, 2013 by Sensuki

[Lephys]

I didn't say you were against it, either. I just wanted to understand why you thought basic waypoints were such a trivial, insignificant implement. Also, movement-queuing (waypoints) and action/ability-queuing are completely separate things, for what it's worth. Although, they can both be pretty useful.

 

I understand your desire not to use ability-queuing, and your perspective of it being lazy. However, if "just use all your abilities back-to-back in rapid succession!" is actually not a mediocre strategy, and no amount of timing or real-time adaptation produces any huge benefit to your party's combat effectiveness, then I'd say the game has some more potent issues at play. So, with that in mind, I say LET people queue as many commands as they want. If you want to give your character 7-straight-minutes-worth of orders, have fun cancelling 6-minutes-worth of those over and over, and continuously re-issuing such a huge queue.

 

Also, as much as I support your "I like to just manual handle all the commands real-time" stance, basic command queuing isn't so much about that as it is about not having to hyper-manage the group just to prevent people from standing around doing nothing (or performing highly inefficient behaviors). At it's most basic, I don't see wanting to be able to tell your Ranger to pick 3 different targets with 3 different abilities, in succession, and not wanting to have to wait for each arrow to leave the bow just to issue the next command, as being particularly lazy. It's not as if manually firing off those abilities would've required manual aiming or some other player-precision that the command queue is taking care of without player input. If timing was required, then one-or-more of your Ranger's arrows are going to strike obstacles, or be otherwise lessened in effectiveness. So, again I say, if someone just wants to queue everything up and never micromanage in the slightest, then let them deal with the consequences. If there weren't any consequences, I'd be a little upset about it.

[Ffordesoon]

If it's "consolized" to want my characters to go where I tell them to go without getting stuck on a bit of scenery every single time, then f**k it, I'm marching in the console army.

 

The one thing that I've never understood about the cRPG community is this weird attachment to features that make the games objectively worse. This is a perfect example. What's the one aspect of the IE games that is universally derided? The pathing. So someone suggests a way to make it better, and immediately someone else pops in and says, "Well, I didn't need any of that in the IE games, and you're catering to stupid people if you allow players to do things like plan their moves and not waste their time and enjoy themselves!"

 

I realize I'm being a curmudgeon, and I apologize for that, but there is no logical reason why some of this old, janky crap should not be improved.

 

I admit, I'm a layman. I do not know what "improved" would actually mean. But I do know that the approach the IE games took would not fly today. In fact, I distinctly remember reading all the reviews of the games as they came out, and the bad pathfinding was mentioned every single time. It didn't fly back then either!

 

Is the solution proposed in this thread perfect? I dunno. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't have the authority to make that call. All I know is that it strikes me as idiotic to say that the pathfinding system in the IE games was more or less fine, so let's just do that again in this game made in 2013. There was plenty in those old games that was terrific and worth iterating on, but not everything in them was gold-plated astronaut ice cream sex.

 

Again, apologies for the crabby tone, but Sensuki's post brought that out in me (inadvertently, I'm sure).

[Hormalakh]

i disagree sensuki. the whole issue with pathfinding in IE was that you didn't know where your characters were going to go: up the stairs or around the whole city because you had someone blocking their path up the stairs. With the "line" you could see what their intended path is. that's the whole point.

 

in the beloved IE games, I always shift clicked paths. i guess i could do the same here, but sometimes i ended up having to make a ludicrious amount of shift-clicks because i couldn't risk my party rolling up all willy nilly next to the dragon without my knowing it.

 

this is meant to give players feedback. in a tactical game like this you need as much feedback about party intentions as possible without cluttering up the game.

 

sure, maybe you can turn off the pathing just like you could turn off the feedback circles in the old IE games. but it should be a mechanic that exsits. tactics demand it.

Edited May 21, 2013 by Hormalakh

[Sensuki]

I didn't say I was against waypointing ?

[bonarbill]

Controls and pathfinding needs to be a huge improvement from the IE game.  I think they should look at the dota style games like League of Legends and Dota 2 for movement in an isometric game (not for gameplay though ).  Character response to clicking feels "smooth", and pathfinding rarely seems to be a problem (well, 97% of the time).