Bug/unexpected behaviour with custom pathing

MouseMouse The Lighter Side of Pessimism Join Date: 2002-03-02 Member: 263Members, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
edited October 2017 in Mapping
If you didn't know, you can add custom pathing to your map to change which parts of the map are accessible to drifters, MACs, cyst chains, etc. You can do this by creating some geometry and putting it in the Pathing layer.
However there's some behaviour that I didn't expect:
- Custom pathing geometry completely overrides the default nav mesh. That is, if you have any pathing geometry in the map, the game won't even attempt to generate a nav mesh.
- Buildings can only be placed on pathing geometry that overlaps collidable geometry or meshes.
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- If the custom pathing geometry is too complicated (I'm not sure what counts as too complicated/invalid, but I'd guess vertical or upside down faces might do it) you get the error "Error: Failed to add an obstacle - no tile cache". This appears in ServerUpdate, MainThread and ClientGame::UpdateWorld

[EDIT] After talking with some other mappers it seems (apart from the bug) that this is exactly how the pathing system is supposed to behave.
If there aren't any problems with drifters/MACs avoiding hallways, it's the generated nav mesh is good enough.
But if there's some section of the map that needs custom pathing, you need to create a nav mesh for the entire level out of geometry and put it in the Pathing layer in spark.

Comments

  • BeigeAlertBeigeAlert Texas Join Date: 2013-08-08 Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
    There really shouldn't be any part of the level that requires manual labor to make the pathing mesh. If auto-generating the mesh doesn't work, you should either tweak the auto generation settings, or tweak some collision geo around the problem areas. Life's too short to hand-model pathing mesh.
  • MouseMouse The Lighter Side of Pessimism Join Date: 2002-03-02 Member: 263Members, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
    That's exactly what I wound up doing. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to get the generated pathing to like me, I just put some collision over the steep ramp that I was working on.
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