Newsfiend
09-30-2009, 09:22 AM
LadraAB wrote:
Thanks Aristo.
Finally someone admits that no time is spent doing NPC pathing..
/duck
Yes, this is meant to be a joke. But seriously, pathing still is horrible!
Heh. He left out that step.
There are 2 types of NPC pathing. Idle pathing and Aggro pathing.
Idle pathing is done by hand by a designer, placing points, paths and defining open spaces for NPC's to wander when they are idle. This takes about a day for a designer. Can be a bit longer or shorter depending on the zone geometry.
Aggro pathing is done with a tool, that generates it all, taking 2 to 8 hours depending on the zone and computer running the pathing tool) Then a designer goes in and runs around looking at a bunch of green boxes and tries to find spots where the green boxes don;t connect. They then place a "refinement" box there, asking for smaller boxes to get them to fit in that spot... then run the tool again, this time the tool takes a bit longer since it has to deal with the refinement boxes... then look at it again, find holes... etc... This gets spread out over a while while the designer does other things.
QA will then often report places where the NPC's act weird and we go check for a hole and put refinement boxes there.
And finally certain types of holes due to geo we can't really fix... so... there still ends up being some bad spots... we just try and reduce it as much as possible.
Admittedly, sometimes more passes at closing the gaps need to be done, it becomes a balance of time spent vs the ability to improve it only incrementally.
More... (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=155907&post_id=2299872#2299872)
Thanks Aristo.
Finally someone admits that no time is spent doing NPC pathing..
/duck
Yes, this is meant to be a joke. But seriously, pathing still is horrible!
Heh. He left out that step.
There are 2 types of NPC pathing. Idle pathing and Aggro pathing.
Idle pathing is done by hand by a designer, placing points, paths and defining open spaces for NPC's to wander when they are idle. This takes about a day for a designer. Can be a bit longer or shorter depending on the zone geometry.
Aggro pathing is done with a tool, that generates it all, taking 2 to 8 hours depending on the zone and computer running the pathing tool) Then a designer goes in and runs around looking at a bunch of green boxes and tries to find spots where the green boxes don;t connect. They then place a "refinement" box there, asking for smaller boxes to get them to fit in that spot... then run the tool again, this time the tool takes a bit longer since it has to deal with the refinement boxes... then look at it again, find holes... etc... This gets spread out over a while while the designer does other things.
QA will then often report places where the NPC's act weird and we go check for a hole and put refinement boxes there.
And finally certain types of holes due to geo we can't really fix... so... there still ends up being some bad spots... we just try and reduce it as much as possible.
Admittedly, sometimes more passes at closing the gaps need to be done, it becomes a balance of time spent vs the ability to improve it only incrementally.
More... (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=155907&post_id=2299872#2299872)