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On July 09 2010 02:05 Tamlin wrote:
A more common but arguably more trivial side effect of this occurs if you send a scout just as the opponent walls off his ramp. Have you ever sent a scout which refused to go up the ramp and instead just sat at the wall on the side of the ramp, often ending up promptly getting shot by a marine without giving you any scouting info whatsoever? This is because the pathing algorithm already knows that the ramp is walled off even though you haven't scouted it, so instead of trying to go up the ramp (and showing you what building are actually blocking it) it goes to the closest reachable point, which is often next to the wall at the side of the ramp. Personally I avoid this problem by giving scouts waypoints on and above the ramp before continuing into the base..
I also find this annoying. Not huge, but should be changed
P.S. I find it funny that we are complaining that the pathing is too good 
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It's pretty annoying to send my scouting worker or zergling to the opponent's base and it just get stuck at the ramp because they walled off. I guess we just gotta be more active with checking the scout.
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I have used this before.
When my scout goes to a base and ends up going the other way before it hits the ramp, i know the player is there without ever revealing my scout.
It's definitely a bug, at least IMO. Voted yes+fix.
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since it COULD be abused providing an advantage - no matter how small - it should be fixed
thanks for sharing this with us
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Pathing is a very complex thing to compute and requires alot of processor speed. I am sure whatever they have done to make the game run smoothly with hundreds of zerglings all pathing at the same time means they have made HEAVY optimizations to their pathing code.
Trying to fix an issue like this is likely at the root of the engine itself. I may be wrong, it might be easy, but I would guess it is. Fixing this would likely take more than just designers but require skilled programmers redoing a fundamental algorithm of the game. Blizzard isn't (and in my opinion shouldn't) risk changing something like that at this stage as the number of bugs that may get introduced from changing something like this would be huge.
I don't think you want to risk the bugs that may come with making a change that only minority influence balance.
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when I go back to bw from sc2 I'm always taken aback at the pathing, and when I go back to sc2 from bw I'm equally surprised by the pathing. Anyways, it's pretty unrealistic how it currently is, but changing how it works could be difficult.
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I know this issue from Wc3 as well.
(For those who actually played Wc3. On the 2vs2 Map Avalanche was a expo blocked by destructible rocks. So when you directed a scouting unit towards this expo position you could often tell pretty early whether or not the rocks have been taking down by the path your scouting unit goes.
However clever players could simply build something at the destructible rocks gab which gave some players the illusion the rocks weren't taken down.)
I'd actually like this to be fixed though it's of course no bug but rather a feature. And perhaps there would be some performance decreases and other issues when it's done the other way.
E.g. on Blistering Sands. You send a Probe scouting the terrains main base. On arrival the a blocked ramp is revealed. Now how should the Probe react? Should it get as close to the blockade as possible? Should it automatically try to enter via the backdoor (destructible rocks)?
Or imagine Reaper play. You order your Reaper to jump up the cliff at this one point where the Toss built a Gateway. However if the pathing decision required vision the Reaper must try to get up the cliff at that point even though it's impossible as there's simply no place.
Just to demonstrate that it's not as simple as it may seem.
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It definitely should NOT be fixed it allos players to do thigns like hold position wall in areas to make anyone using auto-pathing go a LONG route around instead of engaging the army. And besides, it doesn't take forcefields into consideration so players still have to pay attention to avoid forcefield traps (pathing doesn't know the forcefields exist)
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This actually may be harder to fix than you guys realize... Where does the the psychic pathing end... does it end in your vision? Does it end in a radius around the units affected? Does it matter if there is fog of war? etc etc...
I think trying to change this may end up screwing up more things than fixing, however, if it is possible to fix it for good, without significant performance dampening, then sure.
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I just played a game where I attack moved my army into my opponents base. His ramp was completely walled off and my units didn't even go up the ramp to attack the buildings, they just kept dancing right by the cliff while my opponents army was getting free shots at them. I had to deal with banshee harrassment at my main so I just ordered an attack move without checking on them.
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f4hy, I agree with everything you say, except I don't think the change would be _that_ huge. I think a lot of you guys are overthinking the complexity of this problem from a developer standpoint. And here's why:
The pathfinding itself need not change at all. The only thing that would change is the map data that the pathfinding is working from. Currently all units use one and the same set of map data for pathing. Changing this so that half of the units uses one data set and the other half another isn't programmatically huge. Especially if you consider that there already exists - guaranteed - a pair of map data sets (or more for bigger games) that keep track of what buldings and destructibles are visible to each player when rendering the screen, so pretty much exactly the map data that is needed for fixing the problem should already exist in the system. So again, not huge.
And btw, I work as a software developer.
However, in the end I defintely agree that there is absolutely risk involved in implementing a fundamental change like this so it is by no means realistic to expect any fix for this soon, definitely not before release. But maybe if enough of us say what we think and show how this can and does affect gameplay, maybe the dev team will bring it back up for discussion and fix it in a future patch or episode release.
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Isn't this only an issue now because people lack map control compared to BW? I might be too much of a noob to understand how this destroys the game that your scout realizes something is walled off when you would have scouted it anyways.
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On July 09 2010 06:45 Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo wrote:
E.g. on Blistering Sands. You send a Probe scouting the terrains main base. On arrival the a blocked ramp is revealed. Now how should the Probe react? Should it get as close to the blockade as possible? Should it automatically try to enter via the backdoor (destructible rocks)?
In fact, in SOME ways fog of war actually does it's job. If you try to build a nexus/cc/hatch at some middle-of-the-map expansion, and when you get there it turned out your opponent had already built there, your worked will go "building blocked" or whatever. The same thing could easily work in the situation you describe: rationally the probe should follow its path up to where the building blocks it and go "path blocked" or whatever.
On July 09 2010 06:45 Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo wrote:
Or imagine Reaper play. You order your Reaper to jump up the cliff at this one point where the Toss built a Gateway. However if the pathing decision required vision the Reaper must try to get up the cliff at that point even though it's impossible as there's simply no place.
That's actually an interesting problem, hadn't thought of that.
I guess if the reaper could reverse the first half of the jump animation mid-jump, i.e. undo the jump.. or just not jump and do a "path blocked" like above.. Or I dunno, there definitely are kinks like this to work out, but it is by no means impossible!
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On July 09 2010 02:40 theqat wrote:
Holy smoke, what a great first post. Thank you for having a positive/neutral attitude and not filling your post with anti-Blizzard tripe.
I do think the AI functionality should be changed specifically because it has given away that my opponent killed the rocks on Blistering Sands a few times.
Yes, this should be taken out at all costs, and could be a game breaker.
+ Show Spoiler +I don't find anything wrong with hating on Blizzard because of all the things they have and are currently screwing up, actually 100% of people should be hating on Activision-Blizzard right now.
Explanation:
The only game I have on Xbox 360 is Modern Warfare 2.
The only PC game I have played in the past year is the Starcraft 2 Beta.
After playing Modern Warfare 2 for over 10 days total playtime, I have to say that Activision doesn't give a damn about glitches or exploits in their game, as long as people are buying their 15$ map packs so they can get their precious money.
Starcraft 2 is shaping up to be a dissapointment. No lan, no chat channels etc, I'm actually afraid to give Activision-Blizzard anymore of my money at this point.
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On July 09 2010 06:53 Tamlin wrote:
f4hy, I agree with everything you say, except I don't think the change would be _that_ huge. I think a lot of you guys are overthinking the complexity of this problem from a developer standpoint.
My guess though is that the part of the engine that calculates pathing does not actually know anything about the users and how much they can or can't see. The user data is certainly in a different object would have to be passed into the engine.
Granted I do not know how the engine works or how their pathing is computed, but it seems like a sane design to have the engine that computes pathing ignorant to data about what gets displayed and what the user sees.
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Personally I think that since both players will have the same pathing there's no way an unfair advantage could be created by it. However it is very annoying some of the issue that come as a result of the pathing system, but hey BW had a pathing system you had to fight through to control the command, and this one is far less cumbersome, despite its short-comings.
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In summary, 2 separate problems:
Psychic Path Finding:
- technically not that difficult of a problem. in terms of memory or computational costs it wouldn't be significantly more expensive. it all depends on whether the engine is structured to handle this
- there will be corner cases where this just doesn't make sense in the game - ex: reapers up a blocked cliff, though these corner cases can be handled individually
- personally I think it's dumb that your units are psychic
Real Time Path Finding:
- technically much more difficult if thought of naively. the best path finding algorithm is more expensive than expected.
- solution can be to simulate real time pathfinding. for example, isolate certain actions that would affect paths. for each action, taken, check the paths affected and recalculate as necessary. this solution might even be less computationally expensive than the current solution, which is to update paths every few seconds.
- potential problem with this solution is if someone spammed supply depot raise lower really quickly, might (but not necessarily) cause problems. this can probably be solved with some sort of decay variable on the previous x # of actions.
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Really, all players doesn't play under the same circumstances with the psychic path finding. Terran, for example, is more prone to walling in and im sure there are more examples where this is more useful to one of the two races in various setups.
Definietly not a big problem, but should get fixed.
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Scrap Station - another map which has this problem very noticeably. Suppose one player kills both shortcut rocks and prepares/hides his army there. The other player scans the main, sees almost no army, and sends attack. What should happen is - the attack force should take the long way, not knowing that the rocks are missing, and then the hidden army could flank him. What actually happens is - the attack force magically goes right towards the rocks and finds the hidden army as if the AI is maphacking.
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The poll needs the option "This is clearly intentional and I prefer its effect on gameplay to the alternatives".
Edit: Which, with after more thought, I don't personally think.
Imagine Blistering Sands, you break down your rocks and have your army there and your enemy attacks your natural, not knowing you broke the rocks.
Amazing attack from behind incoming.
I would love to hear HD crying out "IdrA doesn't realize White-Ra destroyed his rocks, is he going to see it in time?!"
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EPT
