Spring RTS Engine

Kloot wrote:http://kloot.darkstars.co.uk/ZKRampTooSteep.png (demo)

This is definitely an engine bug. This ramp is theoretically passable by vehicles which have half the slope tolerance of the unit in question. There is no chance of the terraform visualisation being wrong to that extent. In that image it looks like the path cost has not updated.

The fact that ramps are built in separate sections should not matter to the engine. All the sections have the same gradient.

The brown line in this image shows the ramp steepness which is passable for this unit.
http://i.imgur.com/1wbmk.jpg (demo)

I forsee the response "the engine can't update paths as soon as they change" and I think that is a reasonable limitation. My point is just that this statement;

Those red "inf" values mean the top part of your ramp is actually too steep for an armcom, so the pathfinder does exactly what it should by returning paths *around* the center mountain.

is false.

Remember when we were doing that hardcoded ramp on Castles? Now I think it was actually that the path updating that failed rather than the cost of slope that was causing that bug.

I don't think I saw that before that Spring version, whichever it was...
Too much speculation though.

Sandcastles?

Yes, this one?

Mm... GoogleFrog might rememeber what I meant. Propably noone else.
He made a widget that placed a specific ramp on that map and units wouldn't use that ramp even though it was traversable for them.

Would it be possible to get manual access to fiddle with the pathing updating? That is, a way to directly tell the engine "don't bother updating pathing yet, this is an intermediate modification" and then say "hey, I'm done mutating terrain at this region and this terrain change is important, I really need you to update pathing through here!"

Clumsier than just letting the engine handle it automagically, but it would allow ZK's crazy gameplay and would even let the modifications get animated smoothly.

Yes, that's a great idea, will just need a nice big tooltip for it for new players.

The videos of the new pathfinding seem outstanding! If they work as well in general play as in those test cases, then we have pure gold here.

varikonniemi wrote:The videos of the new pathfinding seem outstanding! If they work as well in general play as in those test cases, then we have pure gold here.

Only if they also are optimized enough to handle up to 1000 units moving at the same time. For large team games, expecting that many units to move at once isn't unrealistic and will happen quite often.

But yeah, I'm sure something great will manifest sooner or later to main branch!