Strange SCV attack behavior? - Page 3

On February 24 2012 18:10 InPlainSight wrote:
Having watched the replay I think it may be an intentional feature of the engine. It seems that if the target is obscured by some obstacle the scv will follow the intial path to the targeted location before retargeting what was actually clicked on.
-In the first diagrams the probe was initially behind the barracks.
-In the replay at 2.30 I think the scv was slightly obstructed by the warping in gateway and at 5~ the probe was behind the geiser.

This behavior actually makes sense as computing pathing around immovable features (buildings, terrain etc) is expensive. Thus making the unit follow a strict path if there are obstacles in the way is cost efficient as checking whether the current path is best every single frame is pretty crazy especially if you consider dozens of units doing this. The engine might recompute paths once every few seconds to stop this happening in some instances but in these cases the paths were quite short.

This is the best explaination I can come up with atm. Could be completely wrong and this doesn't seem to address why people seem to experience this more with scvs than with probes/drones.