Pathfinding seems awfully off. It just feels weird. I had this. Friends and clanmate have this. Stream viewers confirm this.
Just today my ally with TC HH could not attack an ancient of war from the left. There was no building or units in between. Yet his HH and my bears wanted to detour the entire base to strike the AoWar.
This weird stuff happens a lot more. Turns out that deforged runs on RoC pathfinding settings? What the fook? Set this to TFT pls. It is so difficult to move around creeps, pull off surrounds and sometimes even have workers move to start building production.
Edit;
Screenshot of pathfinding attempt to attach the AoWar
We made massive corrective clicks, yet hard to change the mind of the units; they fully ran into the base. Took a lot of time and damage. Visible that dryads, bears and warden completely detour. You also see HH position at the south of tree of life in their late/uncorrected re attempt to attack the AoWar.
I was in that game. i couldnt for the life of me get my headhunters to attack a ancient of war that was well within their range. They somehow went to walk into the opponents base, after after multiple attempts of right clicking the ancient of war. It was definitely a mis calculation on what my units shouldve been doing by the game.
So I actually re-ran this base layout versus the computer. Just to be sure I did not accidently move my hero or misplaced the rally point while spamming. Replay here
So: the rally point is placed near the blue ogre/shop (simulating attempt to get circlet). Base layout the same as in the actual game. Pathfinding is the same. It pops out right top of altar. Goes south of the main. Then walks up in between the main in altar, tags a tree and then proceeds to the shop. For all intent in purposes, I did not select my blade to prevent any corrections or flaws.
Some pls tell me it is me. But it has not always been like this. We notice this with building placement, surrounds, attacking buildings. general unit movement around corners. It is insane. To somewhat experienced players this should be second nature and it pretty crippled now.
Edit:
Some more:
Red shows how ghoul returned his lumber. Blue shows the path how gets back
These rifles did not leave the base at all. It took me some time wondering where my rifles were as they did not show up in combat. Had to manually click them step by step to exit the base.
Edit2;
Just to keep showing that some weird stuff is happening; both this abom and prior units eventually continued the routing by walking towards the corner top right tree, as they all only 1 route on this map to reach the army. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/277878600424882177/693356651176132628/unknown.png?width=1204&height=677
There seem more issues with pathing; maybe you can look up the youtube channel of “Annoying Warcraft3”, whom also made a few video’s about pathing and sudden game drops, while still in the game
Yeah, I just tested this myself. Just played around a bit with pathfinding.
The twitch vod can be found here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/577532127
But especially check the 3m30s into it. You clearly see the AM needs to touch a specific point on his route. Like an airplane needing to fly onto some specific coordinates. Frankly, this pathfinding is like playing Legion TD of Winter Maul Wars.
As reaction mentioned, Annoying Warcraft3 (aka chuddy?) has several of these as well.
At 21s his militia, which he has not selected, suddenly stops attacking and runs off into into the horizon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t28giyg-CKY
He has more of this. This DK clearly wants to go left when ordered, but then changes his mind to go left. It simply cannot decide. Spamming movement path basically causes the hero to be idle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8qPH385gTY
And he took the liberty of explaining it further https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmrfCVzDcGA
Based on this, I’m willing to raise the following hypothesis:
When ordering a unit to move from A to B the game secretly sets pathways which do not account for units. These pathways must be obeyed by the unit.
The pathways used to coordinate an unit from A to B is not the most efficient way, even relative to the legacy system.
The terrain surface used for calculating potential routes is insufficient which may cause an unit to become idle as the open route might be ‘too big of a detour’
As Annoying Warcraft3 pointed out in his latest vid: ideally we want to control for these tests in the legacy system. Unfortunately this is not available anymore.
However, due to various individual sources report the same hiccups in movements in the past weeks/months I feel it is fairy safe to indicate that pathfinding has been altered by Blizzard. And not for the better. Perhaps I am wrong and just seeing ghosts, but it at least worth looking into.
As far as I remember WC3 used a double A* algorithm for path calculation. You could exploit the algorithm in custom games like sheep tag.
The problems I see in the screenshots look more like missing waypoints on unit descriptions (either stored or after the placement) rather than the result of a modified algorithm.
Honestly if they didn’t even care to add a proper interface I doubt they were even able to mess with a path finding algorithm…
I’m bumping this again. I’ve had multiple discussions with various people on this topic. The weird thing is: many people complain about pathfinding. Not because it is clunky, because it is, it was in legacy as well, but because it MORE clunky than in legacy. Now the weird thing is: not everyone is complaining about this.
So the discussion turned into a finger pointing case of ‘it was like this in legacy’ versus ‘it was not like this in legacy’.
I installed legacy, opened it up next to reforged and executed the same orders to units in both platforms. Conclusion: reforged pathfinding is changed. Units objectively move differently.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/767194505
Video will be up for only a week, but I can remake it anytime we want.
Please blizzard, have a look at it, investigate and fix : (
Ok, beside jokes, I tell you what happens. It is not that it moves to a new waypoint or that it weirdly moves.
The difference in the pathfinding is:
The original one, in case the ith waypoint is dynamically blocked, it looks for a new path to the target location. Now you should check, since the target location is the next waypoint, if it just skips the ith one and goes to the i+1th one, or tries to rebuild a new path. You can try this by blocking 2 exits in a row. If it bumps on the second one too.
Reforged, in case the ith waypoint is dynamically blocked, it looks for a new path to the same ith waypoint, then it follows the waypoints to the target location.
Blindly understanding a pathfinding algorithm is not always that easy. I was discussing this stuff with Retera before and there is quite a lot of confusion about it.
There may be cases in which this behavior could help your units in game. Depends on the case.
It is not bugged, it is just differently implemented.
Does it make more or less sense?
I got pwned a couple of times for this problem wondering why my unit was moving in the wrong direction when the shortest path was actually on the other side, so I guess not…
Fact is, it doesn’t need a fix, it needs a revert, like more or less the whole game…
