Is this real?

[HybridSoldier]

Listen, few days ago I found someone playing this game differently. I mean, when this guy besiege castle, he go up to the gate and find a lever and he manage to open the gate, his troops doesn't use the ladder again because they can storm the castle via the gate. Is this a script or mod or something?

 

[TheFreshPrince]

Ah never mind, not important either way

 

[Noudelle]

is he playing on an older version? i know we could do this in older versions but i don't think we can do it anymore...

 

[John Felton]

In older patches, you could open the gate like in multiplayer, just by going to the gatehouse and rolling the machine. I tried this in free roam, and it worked.

But I think they removed it in 1.153 as I cannot do that anymore.

 

[hirovard]

It was 1.143 it was removed, it seems they removed some of the good features like infinite corpses, openable gate houses And others I can't remember.

 

[Glycerius]

That's annoying.

 

[WuTaNiSt]

I think they removed the openable gates because they never worked right or were buggy as hell for ai pathfinding or something

 

[John Felton]

I think they removed the openable gates because they never worked right or were buggy as hell for ai pathfinding or something

There IS no AI in this game. Just braindead bodies that roam around doing nothing...

 

[Noudelle]

I think they removed the openable gates because they never worked right or were buggy as hell for ai pathfinding or something

There IS no AI in this game. Just braindead bodies that roam around doing nothing...

and running into walls

 

[DogSoldieR]

and

... into rocks

... into trees

... into horses

 

[tzlop]

and

... into rocks

... into trees

... into horses

Or fall off castle walls....  trip in snow....  jump off cliffs (later caused by players).

 

[hruza]

AI pathfinding is quit simple in this game. And reason is that with dozens or even hundreds AI controlled characters in scene more advanced pathfinding would slow your computer to standstill.

 

[bakters]

Maybe, but i doubt it.  What slows my computer is not when a lot happens on the screen, but when enemies spawn, and this is related to a quite different choke point.  Recalculating path once or twice more would do nothing, if done correctly.  To some extent it's done already, because AI not always uses the shortest possible rout, but sometimes goes around mountain tops, because it's much faster.  Including other obstacles wouldn't change much, if anything.

Anyway, in WFaS AI rarely ever gets stuck on anything, and rarely ever rides in front of you too.  I don't know what they did, but whatever they did seems to work reasonably well.

 

[hruza]

Pathfinding can be very computation heavy, especially some more advanced and more precise algorithms. Like A-star and its variations which is used in most computer games. To recalculate path for say 100 units every second would be real strain on hardware.

What MB is using seems to be some kind of follow until hit obstacle then slide around the obstacle with invisible geometry used to channel or block paths as necessary.

 

[bakters]

That would be PacMan.  While it sometimes looks as bad as this, I doubt it's so naive.  After all, AI rarely gets stuck during sieges in quite complicated castles.  They get stuck on horses everywhere, and on some buggy terrain while on foot.  Otherwise it works fine, so devs must have used something decent.  I suspect they just didn't bother fixing horse specific issues.

 

[imglidinhere]

and

... into rocks

... into trees

... into horses

Or fall off castle walls....  trip in snow....  jump off cliffs (later caused by players).

And randomly floating in mid air... just... floating there...

 

[Vendigr]

For the record, the AI just follows a simple grid that the map-maker sets out. If it encounters an obstacles it seems to just try going left or right/ other random movement.  A lot of Taleworlds AI meshes are slightly... lacking

 

[hirovard]

They are also a pain to work with, I tried to create a mesh to go up a siege ladde and it just wouldn't do it

 

[bakters]

For the record, the AI just follows a simple grid that the map-maker sets out. If it encounters an obstacles it seems to just try going left or right/ other random movement. A lot of Taleworlds AI meshes are slightly... lacking

  I looked at it a bit closer recently, and AI seems to prefer a "sensible" direction.  I mean, if they hit a boulder at an angle, they never try to go around it the wrong way.  They also seem to try and weave themselves between obstacles, it's just that they do too little too late, so they often hit them anyway.

Once they get stuck though, they do try to slide around it one way or the other, but don't seem to be able to back off too well.

Whatever.  However simple this pathfinding is, it seems to work much better in WFaS.  It could be that the maps there are much more open, which is a sensible choice.  It could be that the devs tweaked some values in heuristics, or used some other subtle change.  What's important to me as a player is that it works well enough.  If only the rest of the game wasn't so buggy...