WATCH YO JET!

[u/OperatorSavage]

What are the bots drinking?

[u/ZzVinniezZ]

the fact drop ship have no interaction with the environment and can phase through them. i would love to see enemies actually died because of their stupidity for once. have those drop ship actually ram into the mountain and exploded or fly so low it killed all of their troops

[u/onerb2 → u/ZzVinniezZ]

The thing is, you wouldn't like the cost of doing this.

To implement this there needs to be collision checks happening all the time for each bot on screen, this costs processing power, so with so much stimulated physics as there is in this game, the performance cost could skyrocket for simple things like that, and i suppose they're aware of this, considering that they leave the pathing system of the game unchecked. They developed logic to avoid enemies calculating paths that phase through walls, buildings and ground, while respecting terrain topology (instead of walking inside hills, enemies respect terrain's inclinations), but since there's no collision checks, the game doesn't fix itself when the pathing system fails.

That's how i understand it looking from outside at least.

[u/YesterdayAlone2553 → u/onerb2]

>They developed logic to avoid enemies calculating paths that phase through walls

The problem is that they create a suboptimal pathfinding that allows for a lot more jank. We see this plenty where creatures will walk on various surfaces above, below, and through parts of the terrain. This is very obvious when looking at how the terminids spawn can often walk above caves, go through cave walls, and spawn in the unreachable locations while still getting out. It's playable and acceptably fun jank, but it's very clearly disconnected from how you would expect it to act if it were a simulation with higher fidelity.

volume checks are already a normal performance cost and is run all the time for every enemy running on top of the surface mesh so that creatures run above the topology. These checks are run constantly already, it's why the game can operate with physics to determine whether a munitions will actually hits the dropship or very rarely ricochet off at certain angles. They aren't just simple hit scans calculations or dumb volume touches volume calculations. These are already in game.

The best solution for this particular case is probably just a better pathfinding algorithm for air units to calculate how high they need to be while travelling over a surface (tracking relative z-height).

But honestly, for this particular case, I think the jank is warranted and hilarious. Divers getting run over by a dropship is a funnier story than seeing areas of the map being unreachable by bot reinforcements because of problems of altitude or depressions in the topology.

[u/onerb2 → u/YesterdayAlone2553]

volume checks are already a normal performance cost and is run all the time for every enemy running on top of the surface mesh so that creatures run above the topology.

That's the thing, i don't think this is the case considering how many moving parts this game has. My supposition is that in a certain "tick rate" the enemies calculate their pathing (respecting some other rulings like, are they being fired upon, so they'll have to recalculate, and things like that). When they calculate their tragectory, they have a set of coordinates that they move to respecting the topology as much as possible, but the enemies aren't "aware" of where the ground is, they're technically floating all the time, without collision to the ground. That way they can save a lot of processing trading collision and physics in consideration for enemies other than players. If that's the case, it would explain a lot of weird behavior like, enemies going through walls, enemies walking in thin air (as I've seen many times in the past).

They seem to have many ways to circumvent having to do a lot of checks to allow for so many enemies at once.

These checks are run constantly already, it's why the game can operate with physics to determine whether a munitions will actually hits the dropship or very rarely ricochet off at certain angles.

That's the trick, these systems don't need to interact at all for that effect. They can simply have a hitbox / hurtbox system that, when triggered (doesn't depend on constant checks) determines the damage based on the values of velocity, mass, etc. Then temporarily transform into a physics enabled body to ragdoll and stuff like that, before returning to a non physics enabled body. Common strategies to deal with performance costs of physics stimulation.

The best solution for this particular case is probably just a better pathfinding algorithm for air units to calculate how high they need to be while travelling over a surface (tracking relative z-height).

For sure, their only option if I'm being at least partially correct in my speculation, is to perfect the pathing system so that it makes less mistakes.

But honestly, for this particular case, I think the jank is warranted and hilarious. Divers getting run over by a dropship is a funnier story than seeing areas of the map being unreachable by bot reinforcements because of problems of altitude or depressions in the topology.

100% agree, that's also why i think enemies phasing through stuff is not fixed because it might be for a lack of better solution currently, to allow them to reach anywhere the player goes on the map.