Strange pathfinding

[ocn]

Hi there! I'm justing starting building a basic map- just a single room and a corridor currently. Two AIs (a thug and a rat) and both behave strangely when navigating through the map. They keep walking against obsticles like crates, furniture even walls. It looks ridiculous. The map dmaps without any errors and I can't possibly figure out what might be wrong. Any thoughts?

[Melan]

Hi, ocn, and welcome!

 

By default, AI do not find their way around placed objects; you should surround them with a brush textured with common/monsterclip. It is a good building habit to monsterclip your level either while building or in a later phase, and even cut down entire areas where the AI would not go. This also cuts down on pathfinding calculations, increasing performance.The game handles dynamic obstacles such as moveable crates (although not perfectly), you need to only concern yourself with static stuff.

 

Here is more reading on the subject.

Edited December 2, 2010 by Melan

[ocn]

Hi, ocn, and Welcome!

 

By default, AI do not find their way around placed objects; you should surround them with a brush textured with common/monsterclip. It is a good building habit to monsterclip your level either while building or in a later phase, and even cut down entire areas where the AI would not go. This also cuts down on pathfinding calculations, increasing performance.

 

Thanks for the reply. I'll do that, but won't the editor be extremely cluttered after a while? Perhaps there's a filter option somewhere?

 

Cool! It works... That's a very genious way of controlling various aspects of pathfinding. Thanks for enlightening me :-)

Edited December 2, 2010 by ocn

[Melan]

There are two basic ways to filter stuff:

• first, the menu bar has a Filters menu with options for brushes, patches, entities, visportals, clip textures (what you would need at the moment) and more. You can build custom filters if you need to, but you generally don't.
• second, you can use layers to manage your level, and toggle areas on and off. That can also be used to select a collection of brushes or models that obscure or clutter up the editor view - for example, I typically put vegetation into a separate layer to get it out of the way when I am dealing with basic architecture.
• there is a third concern: as your level grows, it can slow down the editor considerably. Here, I again suggest using layers. This has no significance for the game proper: loading times will increase with level size and complexity, but as long as your mission is properly segmented by visportals, it will run without problems.

[Melan]

Also, here is a link to a thread on monsterclipping with concrete examples and a discussion of typical mistakes.

Edited December 2, 2010 by Melan

[Sotha]

Also, here is a link to a thread on monsterclipping with concrete examples and a discussion of typical mistakes.

 

Also remember to keep visportals nice and clean. If you have a visportal penetrated by a worldspawn brush, erratic AI pathfinding will result and the visportal looks just fine.

 

Func_statics and entities can penetrate visportals without issue, but I recommend your portals are always free of clutter.

[ocn]

Also remember to keep visportals nice and clean. If you have a visportal penetrated by a worldspawn brush, erratic AI pathfinding will result and the visportal looks just fine.

 

Func_statics and entities can penetrate visportals without issue, but I recommend your portals are always free of clutter.

 

Looks like I've a lot of reading ahead of me. Visportals??? Worldspawn brush??? I've just come to grips with the "void" concept versus the "solid" concept of the good old Dromed :-)

[STiFU]

Hehe, seems like another Dromed-veteran has arrived? Sweet! Welcome ocn!

 

You place Visportals in doors etc. so that Doom 3 knows which parts of the map need to be rendered from the player's point of view and which don't. Visportals are actually the most important performance aspect in TDM, so make sure you understood how they work before you start building a huge super level. Just follow the A-Z Beginners Tutorial on the wiki, if you don't do that already. It teaches you everything necessary.

[ocn]

Thank you

[Fidcal]

When your map starts to get large or if you want to examine someone else's large map then there is another very important filter for instantly focusing on what you are working on. Check out the key on menu > View > Region > set from xy view. I forget the default but mine is now a single key R.

 

What this means is that everything is instantly filtered out except what you see in XY Top view

 

You can restore everything with the key set on menu > View > Region > switch off but in practice I mostly just switch to another area with my R key. In other words, I zoom out scroll over, hit R. I only ever see that portion except when I want a larger overview for some reason.

 

Of course, you can use it in combination with the filter and layers menus.