Pathfinding

24jel

Is the pathfinding in BG:EE similar to that in the original BG and how does it compare to BG2?

Ulfgar_Torunn

It uses the same pathfinding as BG 2, as both BG: EE and BG 2 are in the same engine. It is a significant improvement over the BG pathfinding, but still leaves something to be desired.

24jel

Ah ok, cool. At times it can be a bit annoying, especially in narrow halls.

Yovaneth

Many moons back, David Gaider made the comment that the pathfinding was actually too good in that it selected so many ways to go, it could easily snarl itself up. You might get some decent mileage out of reducing the number of pathfinding nodes in the baldur.ini file.

gunman

Unfortunately it is the BG2 pathfinding with some additional glithces like party members not reacting to movement command from the first try, or rare occasions were they take a shortcut through water or other impassable terrain. I don't believe those issues existed in BG1/2.

moody_mage

I read on @TrentOster 's Twitter some time back that when they tried to improve the pathfinding it massively and almost irrevocably broke the entire game. They therefore elected to leave it alone.

[EDIT]; http://beefjack.com/features/rebuilding-baldurs-gate/

"But the most important thing for Oster was making sure the changes didn’t ruin the feel of the game and make it not Baldur’s Gate, which turned into a “running skirmish the entire project”. Attempts to improve the pathfinding was one of these major points. “We tried a few pathfinding improvements, but as the game cutscenes all use the in-game pathfinding system, most attempts simply broke the game and all the cutscenes.
“We still have a few ideas in this area, but it will take time to make it work without borking the game. We played with a lot of other variables and whenever it didn’t feel like Baldur’s Gate, we went back. We love the original game and we wanted to keep the gameplay true.”

24jel

Hm, ok! Generally it works fine, just in certain dungeons it can be a bit frustating. Especially when one of my party members takes another route across ten traps.

Nolrog

gunman said:

Unfortunately it is the BG2 pathfinding with some additional glithces like party members not reacting to movement command from the first try, or rare occasions were they take a shortcut through water or other impassable terrain. I don't believe those issues existed in BG1/2.

Wow. I thought it was me.

I had Imoen cross a river, just her, not the party, and then not be able together back. I had to restore from a previous save (fortunately, I save very often.).

I also noticed that the party doesn't move on the first click sometimes. Thought it was my mouse.

I don't know about too many routes, but sometimes I'll click to move the party one way, and one person goes the exact opposite. Not game breaking, but very annoying.

bigdogchris

I think the BG:EE path finding is not as effective as BG2. I've done several "full map" walks to test this. The two maps I use to test are Gnoll Stronghold and Firewine Ruins.

I think the problem is randomly spawning enemies. When you click to do a full map walk, if no enemies are in the path, the character typically make it just fine (even in Firewine). However, if you do a full map walk, and there are enemies in the corridors (or some other unknown to me reason) characters will get stuck after only a few corners.

Another bug I encountered a few times is when you would click somewhere and the party member would walk a complete opposite direction, towards a destination on the other side of the map. They would walk through walls and black area's of the map. This was an interesting bug.

Sliceofhell

It feels like in BG2 pathfinding is a little better than in BGEE. However it is so terrible in both games that difference doesn't really matter.