Improve Zombie pathing

[Aliblabla]

Hello,

 

i noticed that the zombies rarely run strait towards me. It seams like the can only walk in strait lines or in 45° angles to the baseline grid. So if you stand anywhere else they tend to run to your right or to your left instead of strait at you (what i would expect from a zombie), and then sudenly turn and run strait at you. This makes aiming actually rather dificult since there mouvements are dictated by an invisible baseline grid which makes it hard to predict.

[Liesel Weppen]

Iirc the zombies run directly to you if there are no obstacles in the way.

If you are in a base or on top of something or obstacles around you, they will do a pathfinding to you and follow that path, because there is no way to go directly to you.

E.g if you standing on top of something, they will head to the ladder, ramp or what ever way they find up to you. If there is no way directly doable, they will find a way with the least resistance. So eg. if you are standing inside a cage of iron bars and one wooden door, they will go for the door.

And some of the Zs may enter "rage mode" and run around randomly and also attack random blocks.

 

And maybe the zombies are not that braindead to run in a straight line up to somebody who is shooting at them, but they run diagonally, BECAUSE it is harder to hit them this way.

 

Edit: I noted if the ground is a slope, that seems to affect pathing. It seems to cause the Zs to run parallel to the slop and then turn 90° and run directly uphill. I guess this is calculated to be faster, because parallel to the slope their runway is even and the way to go upwards, which also slows down zombies, becomes shorter.

[Aliblabla]

On 7/7/2020 at 12:22 PM, Liesel Weppen said:

Iirc the zombies run directly to you if there are no obstacles in the way.

thats not what i am noticing in the game, thats why i post it.

 

On 7/7/2020 at 12:22 PM, Liesel Weppen said:

And maybe the zombies are not that braindead to run in a straight line up to somebody who is shooting at them, but they run diagonally, BECAUSE it is harder to hit them this way.

could be a feature indead except that in certain cases they do. Even the crossrun is preductible, the second one runs the same way the first does which makes me think its not a feature since in that case it should be more random.
 

[xyth]

There is no way to edit the AI pathing without code.  The game uses Astar pathing code, and it works like "Z" as far as I can tell.

[Dethar]

On 7/7/2020 at 4:21 AM, Aliblabla said:

Hello,

 

i noticed that the zombies rarely run strait towards me. It seams like the can only walk in strait lines or in 45° angles to the baseline grid. So if you stand anywhere else they tend to run to your right or to your left instead of strait at you (what i would expect from a zombie), and then sudenly turn and run strait at you. This makes aiming actually rather dificult since there mouvements are dictated by an invisible baseline grid which makes it hard to predict.

I usually back and strafe till they are at cardinal points.

 

It would take ripping out big part of code for different AI code. Don't remember exactly what Fatal has said about it, but that the pathing used was best for voxel game I believe.