pathfinding issues

[eigenface]

In No Honor Among Thieves 1/3, as soon as I exit the inn, there's a small archway to my left, a hole which is wide at ground level but quickly tapers, which I could probably crawl through but not walk through. An AI got stuck in that archway. He just kept walking without ever getting anywhere, unable to fit through the hole.

 

At first, I thought this was a problem with the pathfinding code, but that made me wonder about the state of pathfinding in games today. Would the same thing happen in any other engine? Do any engines actually sweep the AI's physics model along potential paths before the AI gets there, in order to make sure they're passable? Or do they all just calculate pathfinding based on the ground (as dark mod apparently does)?

 

If the latter, maybe it's not reasonable to expect the pathfinding code to fix problems like AI getting stuck in the archway. Maybe it needs to be solved at the level of map building. For example, an "AI path blocker" object with a bounding box, which could be placed under the arch. The object would be invisible and the player would be able to pass through it, but AI would react to it the same way as a transparent wall (i.e. not try to walk through it.) I'm curious, is this a pathfinding-algorithm issue or a map-building issue?

[plasticman]

Basic pathfinding works out of the box, but it usually needs manual optimizing by the mapper (via monsterclip-brushes).

 

See Wiki.