Pathfinding in Mac OS X version

Zac

The Macplay ports had pathfinding issues with later versions of OS X (both on native PPC and on Intel machines with Rosetta), where the pathfinding would periodically stop working and you couldn't get characters to move near obstacles or in anything more than infinitesimal increments. I'd imagine the Mac and Windows versions are both based off the same codebase, if you guys are ripping out all the DirectX stuff and replacing it with OpenGL/OpenAL. I'm a bit curious about what could have caused the problem back then, and what has been changed with pathfinding algorithms for the rerelease, as current computers have much more memory and processing power to work with.

Yovaneth

There was a comment made once by a Bioware employee (David Gaider, I believe?) that the problem with the pathfinding was that it was too good, rather than not good enough. IIRC once a move had been made, the pathfinding was reassessed which could result in the NPC going back to where it had just come from, and so on. In BG1, one fix for this was to reduce the number of pathfinding nodes from the max of 32000. In the BG2 engine the maximum is 400,000 which, oddly enough, does seem to reduce the amount of headbanging against obstacles.

Lavec

Yovaneth said:

There was a comment made once by a Bioware employee (David Gaider, I believe?) that the problem with the pathfinding was that it was too good, rather than not good enough.

LOL. It was bad because it was too good!?!
From what I remember it was fine if you only moved one character but as soon as you moved your party together they could run into each other and/or turn around and start going the long way around if their path was now blocked. This is especially noticeable when trying to cross a narrow passage. The problem is the algorithm didn't take into account the velocity of characters or npcs blocking the path and ignore them if also travelling in the same direction. The algorithm would see the path is now blocked by a stationary object and determine the shortest path to the destination is a long way around. Otherwise Bioware had created a very good pathfinding algorithm and was proud of it and published some articles on it. Just a minor oversight that caused it to be frustrating in practice. Having the algorithm reassess less often made it less likely to see these blockages and do the back and forth dance but by no means would I say it was bad because it was too good.
For the record I'm making assumptions here so it's a theory and not based on fact.
It would be nice if it could be fixed in BG:EE.

Knoland

I am fairly sure that pathfinding was resolved as part of the "known bugs" at the start of EE...