Pathfinding still broken in 2.6.6.0

3leeTbger

After 23 years, tonnes of promises and updates/patches from the developers, pathfinding is still very poor. This is a total joke.

Recent week, I've played bgee v. 2.6.6.0.

Party members constantly get stuck and bump into/block each other.

Why aren't more people complaining about it? Why can't the devs fix it? Why is one of the highlights of the 2.6 patch "improved pathfinding" , when it still is so buggy?


To the defense of the devs and the supporting community, i must say that bgee 1+2 overall have become better and better since 1998, and are now highly polished and have a low degree of bugs compared to the initial releases.

Tresset

Pathfinding has been a beast of a problem in these games since the very beginning; the original BG1. In all honesty, I would say that BD has made an overall improvement to pathfinding over the years. Sure, there are still problems, but I think they are far less severe than the problems the original games had. Honestly, this is probably as good as pathfinding will ever get in these games. It is a very sensitive thing to mess with and even minor changes to the system could screw everything up in a huge way. This is an old game with an old engine and Beamdog has done their best to bring some improvements to the pathfinding system, and I think what they have accomplished in this area is actually a bit of a miracle in itself.

Some context on pathfinding in the games.

Here are some of my suggestions on how to better manage pathfinding in these games:

If someone gets stuck bumping into someone else then try clicking somewhere else on the ground and then clicking where you want them to actually go again. This usually un-stucks them. Especially useful in combat if you want to run through enemy lines and they keep blocking you by bumping into you (though in these cases you need to click different ground areas repeatedly to get through, as the enemies are constantly bumping into you as they chase you). If you want to move you group through a narrow passage, try to avoid giving them new orders while they are actually on the narrow passage. This tends to make them turn around if someone is in front of them.

You could try turning on an experimental pathfinding feature called "enhanced path search". I worte a bit about it here.

ithildurnew

The really fubar issue isn't pathfinding per se as in characters having trouble navigating long distances or tricky chokepoints (this can be addressed by clicking shorter distances/more frequently); it's characters getting stuck on top on one another and ending up COMPLETELY UNABLE TO MOVE, often in the middle of combat. I cannot fathom how this issue is still present in 2.6. This never (or practically never) happened in the classic versions, and previous patches of EE did do better in this area. 2.5 clearly broke it again (bad enough that the modding community introduced a slight fix for it), and 2.6 never addressed it. Unbelievable.