Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

richg42.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#81

Post by s_m_t »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #78
pvg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really the same sort of thing. In this case, the programmers are dealing with the tricky problem of trying to fix the pathfinding somewhat while leaving the experience of the original game 'authentic'. The pathfinding is terrible, the pathfinding was terrible 21 years ago when the game came out. These forum posts are not surprising and unexpected whining, just a reminder new audiences are finding bad pathfin…

Maybe the solution is a classic/pro mode and a novice/Renaissance mode.

splitting the player base is almost always a bad idea

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#82

Post by khedoros1 »

overcast wrote: post #41
kakaorka wrote: post #11

I hate that it’s only available on windows 10. Bad move Microsoft!

Windows 8 is 5 years old. Windows 7 is 8 years old. Move on.

And? Age isn't a good argument on its own. If Microsoft committed to providing security updates for Windows 7, I wouldn't see any reason to move off of it. Newer doesn't mean better, in this case.

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#83

Post by khedoros1 »

artimaeis wrote: post #75
kakaorka wrote: post #11

I hate that it’s only available on windows 10. Bad move Microsoft!

Genuinely curious: what other platforms would you like to see this on?

Windows 7, MacOS, or Linux, maybe. Anything that doesn't require access to the Windows Store.

I've got Windows 10 on my machine at work, and on my little netbook-style laptop, but just Windows 7 and Linux on the closest things to "gaming machines" that I've got.

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#84

Post by Const-me »

indescions_2018 wrote: post #36

Just pre-compute everything. Put your vector fields in textures at map design time and be done with it. No point in overthinking this once its a simple lookup per frame. The real fun is designing the agent's AI: exploration, avoidance, engagement ;) Crowd Pathfinding And Steering Using Flow Field Tiles http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro/GameAIPro_Chapter23_Crowd... Flow Field Pathfinding Tutorial http://leifnode.com/…

I have invented and implemented very similar idea, and published an article about it along with source code, many years before that book and that article you’ve linked.

http://const.me/articles/robocalypse-pathfinding/

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#85

Post by baldfat »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #77
preben wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brood War does this all the time. The pathing is notoriously bad[1] and nothing has been done to fix it because it's not a problem. It allows players extinguish themselves by working with the weird behaviors. [1] Day[9] on Pathing in BW https://youtu.be/rWvoMrYCQBU?t=17m50s

As a casual gamer I find this aggravating. Why should the NPCs be left dumber and less human than they could be? It breaks immersion and makes the game harder for novices to enjoy.

When I heard these arguments and no rush or no attacking 20 minutes it would get under my skins. To me the T in RTS was Time and many people wanted to remove Time out of the game.

This is precisely why RTS as a genre pretty much died.

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#86

Post by quadcore »

AstralStorm wrote: post #65
quadcore wrote: post #54

Cool. I've coded a RTS myself, and I might be able to add some information. DE's pather gives up if after many thousands of iterations it can't make forward progress towards the goal, to avoid spending CPU cycles on hopeless pathing unnecessarily. (It's more complex than this, but that's the gist of it.) The right way to do that is to make a unit pop the action on top of its stack if it cant perform it. So if a unit…

Pretty decent, alternative approach is to form virtual "formations" when units near each other and move as blocs. This removes multiple problems like units bumping into each other on the way and is kind of the behaviour a strategy player would expect. On obstruction, make neighbours slow down and indeed use obstruction avoidance (local pathfinding) to "squish" the formations. Return to these later when possible. Marc…

Pretty decent, alternative approach is to form virtual "formations" when units near each other and move as blocs. This removes multiple problems like units bumping into each other on the way and is kind of the behaviour a strategy player would expect. On obstruction, make neighbours slow down and indeed use obstruction avoidance (local pathfinding) to "squish" the formations. Return to these later when possible.

Yes definitely. That is orthogonal to the main pathfinder. Moving units doesnt count as "walls" and so they can just push each other using a physic/collision engine and move all together like one body as well using that engine which is a sort of "local pathfinder" in some ways (it can be tweak so that units tend to avoid each other and all).

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#87

Post by kakaorka »

artimaeis wrote: post #75
kakaorka wrote: post #11

I hate that it’s only available on windows 10. Bad move Microsoft!

Genuinely curious: what other platforms would you like to see this on?

I use windows 7, I refuse to use windows 10 because of the clear privacy issues in it. So I would’ve liked if it worked on windows 7.

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#88

Post by paulryanrogers »

s_m_t wrote: post #81
paulryanrogers wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the solution is a classic/pro mode and a novice/Renaissance mode.

splitting the player base is almost always a bad idea

If the alternative is completely alienating a large pool of potential customers then I don't see the disadvantage

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#89

Post by paulryanrogers »

khedoros1 wrote: post #79
paulryanrogers wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a casual gamer I find this aggravating. Why should the NPCs be left dumber and less human than they could be? It breaks immersion and makes the game harder for novices to enjoy.

Because it's hard to fit a lot of intelligence into the game, when it has to run on a 90MHz Pentium I with 16MB of RAM available. I thought it was pretty good, and more than enjoyable, when it came out 19 years ago.

As did I back in the day. But now I'm older with less time to micromanage pathfinding. And our devices are much faster than when many of these games launched

Re: Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement

#90

Post by owenwil »

khedoros1 wrote: post #82
overcast wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8 is 5 years old. Windows 7 is 8 years old. Move on.

And? Age isn't a good argument on its own. If Microsoft committed to providing security updates for Windows 7, I wouldn't see any reason to move off of it. Newer doesn't mean better, in this case.

It literally does if you use a SSD.
Post reply on HN