EPT
. Hi op ^-^. On topic, agree with your points.Brood War Unit Pathing - Page 3
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sc4k
United Kingdom5454 Posts
. Hi op ^-^. On topic, agree with your points. | ||
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
On June 10 2010 08:54 shalafi wrote: So you think the macro mechanics should be removed? (Or at least, allow more options, like autocast) Not at all, and I've been a big supporter of keeping the macro game intact. However, we shouldn't purposely rely on an old UI and bugs to keep that high skill ceiling in - we should be pushing for developers to fix these annoyances and come up with new and interesting things to add depth to the game. BW is a great game and undoubtedly the best RTS/best competitive video game ever, but I don't think it's a great game because of the shitty UI and bugs. I find that the ridiculously high skill ceiling is an unintended side-effect of these frustrating features and we should work to improve and find better ways to challenge gamers mechanically. | ||
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HumanGod
Canada24 Posts
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hellokitty[hk]
United States1309 Posts
On June 09 2010 22:46 D-Lite wrote: i have a feeling im going to have alot of people telling me to stfu because of this post | ||
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faction123
Australia949 Posts
On June 10 2010 08:41 Stratos_speAr wrote: The problem is that the thing that causes the game to require more skill is simply old and outdated programming that's frustrating. It's a terrible design philosophy to have to rely on archaic UI's in order to force the skill ceiling higher. Games should be evolving to make the skill ceiling raise with deeper strategic thinking and more interesting and complicated tasks. It shouldn't rely on bugs and a crappy UI. SC didn't rely on archaic AI's to make the skill ceiling higher because it was made in 1998. Of course if a developer released an RTS that purposefully limited itself instead of fully utilizing 12 years of advances they'd be retarded, no ones stating otherwise. | ||
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AaronEB
United States76 Posts
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xOchievax
United States69 Posts
One thing to think about is exacty how much of the game would idealy be automated and how much should be manual. In order to give a definite answer you have to specify what the priorities of the game are. If you wanted to make the skill cap as high as you possibly could then the game might involve you sending every single worker back and forth while they mine instead of an automated system. This would be so increadably difficult that only the absolute best could get anywhere close to an efficient game. In fact the skill cap would be soo high that the majority of the market would be effectively incapable of having fun playing the game due to its lack of user friendliness. Now on the other side of the spectrum a game totally designed to be as user friendly as possible would allow any player to play the game compotently right from when they learn the basics by eliminating the difficulty by making much of the mentally challenging multitasking automatic. This game might have autocast worker production and automatic army formation (units form up in a logical formation automatically). It might also lower the damages of units just enough that the new gamer will have time to back out if they realize the battle has become unfavorable or a counter has been played. Lastly the game would probably reduce the player's ability to harass the enemy, as such a thing can overwhelm a new player, and make it too stressfull. Neither of these games would technically be worse than the other. They both just have their own goals in mind. Starcraft BW is closer to the first game presented while Starcraft 2 is closer to the second. Saying one of the two is "better" than the other is incorrect when the goals under which they are made are different. Which game you like is a matter of personal preference. I personally perfer BW, and love it's difficulty even if im not that good. | ||
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buhhy
United States1113 Posts
On June 10 2010 13:28 AaronEB wrote: surprised this topic hasn't died yet. I think its pretty much agreed that the pathing is (at this point) just another obstacle to overcome. Not quite... would you consider fitness an obstacle to overcome when playing basketball? | ||
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HumanGod
Canada24 Posts
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shalafi
394 Posts
On June 10 2010 10:16 Stratos_speAr wrote: Not at all, and I've been a big supporter of keeping the macro game intact. However, we shouldn't purposely rely on an old UI and bugs to keep that high skill ceiling in - we should be pushing for developers to fix these annoyances and come up with new and interesting things to add depth to the game. BW is a great game and undoubtedly the best RTS/best competitive video game ever, but I don't think it's a great game because of the shitty UI and bugs. I find that the ridiculously high skill ceiling is an unintended side-effect of these frustrating features and we should work to improve and find better ways to challenge gamers mechanically. Do you know that they removed UI features from SC2 to make it more challenging? Namely, the wireframe-casting?Do you think that was a right decision? | ||
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Subversive
Australia2229 Posts
Yup. This pretty much sums it all up. | ||
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arb
Noobville17920 Posts
1. Started as a War3 Player. 2. Moved onto SC2 with its nice unit pathing and very few movement problems. 3. Decides to play SC:BW 4. Gets to bw and doesnt like having to do things himself. 5. Creates a thread on TL complaining about it 6. ???? 7. profit. Thats just me though, SC1 is soooo superior cause of the bugs and bad AI its not even funny, yeah you have to do stuff yourself but big fucking deal, id ont like the ai making my shit mine for me, i dont like it showing my idle workers and as such making me into a lazy bastard, i dont like how it takes no skill to fill an entire screen with a spell,I dont like my units moving in a big sex ball or any of that either but hey man thats just me. | ||
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TheNikeYork
United States389 Posts
On June 11 2010 03:12 arb wrote: Basically what im getting from the OP is, 1. Started as a War3 Player. 2. Moved onto SC2 with its nice unit pathing and very few movement problems. 3. Decides to play SC:BW 4. Gets to bw and doesnt like having to do things himself. 5. Creates a thread on TL complaining about it 6. ???? 7. profit. Thats just me though, SC1 is soooo superior cause of the bugs and bad AI its not even funny, yeah you have to do stuff yourself but big fucking deal, id ont like the ai making my shit mine for me, i dont like it showing my idle workers and as such making me into a lazy bastard, i dont like how it takes no skill to fill an entire screen with a spell, but hey man thats just me. Notice where this man is from, gentlemen. Please be kind to him. | ||
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buhhy
United States1113 Posts
On June 11 2010 03:12 arb wrote: Basically what im getting from the OP is, 1. Started as a War3 Player. 2. Moved onto SC2 with its nice unit pathing and very few movement problems. 3. Decides to play SC:BW 4. Gets to bw and doesnt like having to do things himself. 5. Creates a thread on TL complaining about it 6. ???? 7. profit. Thats just me though, SC1 is soooo superior cause of the bugs and bad AI its not even funny, yeah you have to do stuff yourself but big fucking deal, id ont like the ai making my shit mine for me, i dont like it showing my idle workers and as such making me into a lazy bastard, i dont like how it takes no skill to fill an entire screen with a spell, but hey man thats just me. Haha yeah... though I do believe the SC UI can be improved, like a higher resolution, better pathfinding AI (search through more paths) and maybe increased unit selection based on race or supply. | ||
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Roffles
Pitcairn19291 Posts
But Arb makes legitimate claims, cause SC2 has pretty much been dumbed down to where the AI can handle much for you, making it much easier to play. Because units don't clump as well, it takes more time to move them into advantageous positions simply because they don't clump into a big ball that you can move up a ramp in less than like 3 seconds. I wouldn't say BW unit pathing is necessarily a bug or something, just a slight flaw that helps distinguish between a good multitasker and a not so experienced player. But in SC2, it's hard to see that skill gap. Btw, goons and goliaths are still the dumbest units alive. | ||
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
On June 11 2010 02:05 shalafi wrote: Do you know that they removed UI features from SC2 to make it more challenging? Namely, the wireframe-casting?Do you think that was a right decision? All-or-nothing is a pretty bad logical fallacy to rely on. Just because I think we should add some things doesn't mean I think we should add everything under the sun. | ||
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arb
Noobville17920 Posts
On June 11 2010 03:20 Roffles wrote: Rofl, Noobville. Poor Empyrean and Arb. =( But Arb makes legitimate claims, cause SC2 has pretty much been dumbed down to where the AI can handle much for you, making it much easier to play. Because units don't clump as well, it takes more time to move them into advantageous positions simply because they don't clump into a big ball that you can move up a ramp in less than like 3 seconds. I wouldn't say BW unit pathing is necessarily a bug or something, just a slight flaw that helps distinguish between a good multitasker and a not so experienced player. But in SC2, it's hard to see that skill gap. Btw, goons and goliaths are still the dumbest units alive. well i didnt mean to imply it was a bug but yeah..it is verrrry buggy at times, but its what makes the game amazing. as for bugs, you ever tried to move stuff up a ramp and it all starts getting stacked and messing up?  | ||
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clickrush
Switzerland3257 Posts
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sluggaslamoo
Australia4494 Posts
The other thing is magic boxing, in BW I could micro my dragoons in magic boxes against tanks to avoid splash damage, I can't do this in SC2 they just ball up. In fact it is much harder for good players to spread their units out like in BW. So the new AI makes it easier for bad players who just A-move, but it makes it impossible for anyone better than that to actually do anything about it, and that makes for a less exciting game. On June 10 2010 01:47 VIB wrote: This is 100% wrong, the colision detection in sc2 is just as 2d as in BW. SC2 is a 2d game displayed in 3 dimensions, the gameplay is still 100% 2d. The pathfinding logic used in sc2 is exactly the same as the one used in BW. Which is also exactly the same used of pretty much any other game that ever existed. Pathfinding is a very known science that any average computer science student knows of. There aren't much new tricks to how it's made in the last decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinding The pathing in WC3 and SC2 only feels smoother than the one in BW because the calculations are done faster. Pathfinding is a very CPU intensive process and it's what games spend most of their processing time doing. Since at the time BW launched the computers were slower, if Blizzard pushed too much into the pathfinding the game would slow down. So they simply made units look for new paths less often and used less "pixels" (known as threads) to calculate paths. So computers of 10 years ago wouldn't crash. In SC2 and WC3, since computers are now faster, Blizzard just made units recalculate more often and use more threads to calculate it. Since now computers can handle it. Other than that, the system is exactly the same. The only difference between BW and SC2 pathing is that SC2 is faster. Nothing else. All those dragoons getting blocked in ramps are just symptoms of units not re-calculating their paths more often into smaller threads. Its not exactly the same, SC2s pathfinding algorithm is a lot more advanced than SC1, but yes both still uses 2D collision detection. It is to do with processing power but also pathfinding AI knowledge of the time. Threading has nothing to do with pixels or pathing either, but it allows multi-core processors to process more things at once or asynchronously. | ||
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