Re: [glob2-devel] Some feature requests & discussion

[Stéphane Magnenat]

On Thursday 20 January 2005 01.35, Gabriel Walt wrote:
> > Well, please try to understand how the system work before saying things
> > can be solved by easy hacks. Actually there is one gradient for all guard
> > areas of one team and the unit just do a gradient descent. If you want to
> > do per-guard areas, that's much more memory, but also a clustering
> > algorithm, not very difficult but takes human times to do and computer
> > time to run, then you need to find some sort of score otherwise warriors
> > will always walk between areas. So you can see, that's not so easy as a
> > "quick hack".
>
> And you please try to understand what i explained, i know very well that
> there is only one area and that you don't consider zones that are not
> connected as different zones! I didnt speak about multiple areas but
> probably wasnt clear... What i suggested was to move a warrior to a more or
> less randomly chosen part of the guard area - not just move it to the
> nearest one.
>
> Something like if warrior didnt find a war flag or upgrade where to go and
> thus wants to go to a guard area, then not simply go to the nearest
> "sprite" of the guard area, but consider all the "sprites" of guard areas
> within a certain range (just to ensure that the unit is able to go to the
> wanted guard area) and then pick one random guard area "sprite" and go
> there. Once that "sprite" reached, the unit takes the same behavior than
> now and walks around in that area.

Well, once in the guard area, the unit could do some search in it for a random 
position and then pathfind to it. But it is non trivial to implement, is yet 
another hack in the unit state machine, which is already oversized. And it 
will still not solve the problem of all units going to the same nearest area.

> Sorry to insist on that point but i think it's really worth to find a way
> how these areas could be enhanced. Because now the units often go to the
> same piece of area, which makes the guard areas not much more useful than a
> flag. And a good working guard area would imho really improve the game
> usability and thus gameplay.

Once they are in guard area they should move randomly, if it is not the case 
it is a bug.

Steph