On June 22 2010 22:29 sluggaslamoo wrote:

I can also see how bad unit movement can be frustrating for newer players, there is nothing worse for blizzard than to show what looks like an un-polished game. I believe that units should spread out if you carelessly move them about, but they should also not glitch out all the time due to bad pathfinding AI. We do not need to have people "fight the interface" to create good gameplay mechanics, but we still need the side-effects that improve gameplay as a result.

I really like this paragraph, especially the last sentence of it. Fighting the interface is not a sign of skill, its a sign of technology being incapable of recognizing what you want to do with your "stuff". However, there should always be methods in which you can execute in-game in order to maximize efficiency.

Great read.

garbanzo

United States4046 Posts

June 23 2010 17:50 GMT

#86

Awesome post. I really look forward to the next parts.

On June 23 2010 21:02 Swede wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +

Great post

I think that the AI in SC2 is exactly what it should be, for the most part (and no I don't want to win without trying). The AI should do exactly what you tell it to in the simplest way possible. It doesn't make sense for a ball of units moving at the same speed to spread out over a distance. That means that the outlying units will travel a significantly longer path than the ones closer to the center, and it means that when they near their destination (assuming they don't get interrupted by enemy units) they would have to converge again or remain split up. If they remain split up then they haven't achieved what you told them to do as effectively as possible (ie, they are not as close to the original destination as you planned).

The only argument that I can think of for why they SHOULD split instead of remaining in a ball is that that is how it happened in BW (unless someone can argue otherwise?). It doesn't seem sensible to make units less logical and realistic for the purpose of making the game "harder"... Which it doesn't anyway. The new system makes manual splitting much more important to avoid splash damage type attacks (among other things).

And on auto-surround... I don't think it's a big deal. It's exactly what I said above - each unit is calculating the simplest and most efficient path to perform the action you ordered (ie attack). If there is 1 Zergling already attacking a Marine, the next Zergling shouldn't attempt to attack that Marine from the same position, it should move to the next closest position and attack from there. I think auto-surround was terribly mislabeled. It's not like Zerglings split into a perfect concave preemptively. Really it's just the units NOT being incredibly retarded. Besides that, the efficiency of a surround can still be improved immensely by microing, and so I don't believe that the amount of skill has been reduced at all.

I agree with this. From the description of the pathfinding, it seems like auto-surround is a logical step to the AI.

Swede

New Zealand853 Posts

June 23 2010 23:58 GMT

#87

On June 23 2010 23:06 NaturalHacks wrote:
Swede you hit the nail right on the head, are you by any chance the guy I used to play CSS with on scoutsknivez servers?

Woah! Yep that's me! Holy shit that's awesome lol. How's it going

StarcraftAnonymous

United States8 Posts

June 24 2010 00:07 GMT

#88

This is

Nice

I was looking for part 2.
I remember playing starcraft 1v1's for hours and feeling so exausted. I see now its becuase my units were running on outdated engines.

PrinceXizor

United States17713 Posts

June 24 2010 00:25 GMT

#89

I think alot of Brood war fanatics (in a good way) are upset with seemingly a "dumbed down" system in SC2, yeah it's easier to accomplish things you could do in BW. But we have barely reached the beginning of advanced unit controls. For instance, what tricks and uses of the current system result in even more intelligent unit movement than before. We don't know. The basics are on par with the mid-upper level of unit control in BW, who knows what the upper level control will bring.

SichuanPanda

Canada1542 Posts

June 24 2010 00:38 GMT

#90

The biggest problem I have with the SC2 AI is that A-moving even small groups of units (under 20 units) causes them to bunch up into an ultra-tight ball. This causes the army to take MASSIVE amounts of splash damage, but at the same time take minimal damage from single-target attacks. Thus making for an environment where the 'right units' will cause a decimation for one side or the other, as it seems that one must control 8 units at a time to get them to not clump up so much. This could very well be the 'fighting the system' that happened in BW in SC2 form - BW: Units spread out a lot and get stuck on each other and just about everything, SC2: Units get stuck on nothing and clump into gigantic balls. Clearly both systems require the player to change their control methods to avoid the issues of each.

Antisocialmunky

United States5912 Posts

June 24 2010 04:04 GMT

#91

One small nitpick that's probably already been said but I've read in some old tutorials when I was learning A* back in '04 that SC used the the variant of A* that uses dynamically sized 'waypoints' (IE, if you have a map with a chose that is 3 tiles wide, you use a 3x3 way point rather than a 1 by 1 to reduce way point count). So its not always quite the simple 8 directional movement if those articles were correct.

InPlainSight

New Zealand40 Posts

June 24 2010 05:31 GMT

#92

Units in sc1 also animate in 16 directions, supporting this.

sluggaslamoo

Australia4494 Posts

June 24 2010 06:44 GMT

#93

On June 24 2010 13:04 Antisocialmunky wrote:
One small nitpick that's probably already been said but I've read in some old tutorials when I was learning A* back in '04 that SC used the the variant of A* that uses dynamically sized 'waypoints' (IE, if you have a map with a chose that is 3 tiles wide, you use a 3x3 way point rather than a 1 by 1 to reduce way point count). So its not always quite the simple 8 directional movement if those articles were correct.

On June 24 2010 14:31 InPlainSight wrote:
Units in sc1 also animate in 16 directions, supporting this.

Yeah I think I remember working on BW sprites a long time ago having 12 or 16 rotations, I never said they couldn't.

As I said...

On an isometric map where each unit can only go in 8 directions

It is the gridded isometric map which inherently supports 8 directions from a single cell, if the unit moves in-between those rotations it would have to skip a waypoint, the algorithm may allow it to do that, but units appear to not move in that way if possible. As shown by the dragoon pic.

The units move cell by cell and will zig-zag if they find an angle which they can't support in one movement, cell by cell movement on a fixed cell size grid will make units do this. Whether the unit can rotate in 4, 8, 12, 16, 32 directions doesn't matter, the units will still be competing for waypoints, meaning the amount that the units can rotate won't help them navigate around each other, which is the problem.

I don't see how waypoint sizing helps, waypoints usually don't have a size, and units will end up in the same position regardless of size. 3x3 ramps can fit around 6 zerglings, so I don't see how that works either. What I think you mean by dynamically sized waypoints, is that because a dragoon is a 2x2, it will move in steps of 2x2 rather than 1x1.

Keep in mind, this article isn't a tutorial on pathfinding, it discusses the types of pathfinding that causes different behaviour in BW and SC2, as it helps people understand why things like auto-surround occurs.

I'm all for debating about A* but that doesn't really belong in this thread, if you can prove that the units in BW actually behave in the way your theory suggests then by all means go ahead.

TheAntZ

Israel6248 Posts

June 24 2010 13:58 GMT

#94

On June 22 2010 23:47 Peekay.switch wrote:
One of the best article I've read on TL.

not dissing the OP, article is awesome, but even without your name being in name.identifier format it'd be plain to see you haven't read anything from before sc2 came out.