Dear players and contributors,
As some of you may know, I have been working on integrating the new pathfinder, designed by Philip (Ykkrosh) some time ago. After months of work, I am proud to announce that the new pathfinder has been included in the SVN version of the game.
However, you must not think every problem 0 A.D. encounters has been solved. The new pathfinder is in, but a lot of features are still to be implemented and some new bugs have necessarily been introduced.
What is the new pathfinder?
The new pathfinder is actually a new long-range pathfinder, and the short-range pathfinder has been modified and tweaked a bit to adapt it to the changes.
The new long-range pathfinder implements an optimization of the A* pathfinding algorithm, known as JPS (some information here).
It also comes with an entirely new "hierarchical pathfinder", which doesn't compute any paths but deals with the connectivity between two points on the map. As a consequence, it is now possible for the pathfinder to know when it is useless to try to compute a path, thus improving the performance. Before, the pathfinder computed a lot of paths before understanding that some point was unreachable.
Why is not everything fixed with the new pathfinder?
The main thing is that the new pathfinder is designed to solve the big problems that the old pathfinder had (for instance the discrepancies between the long-range and the short-range pathfinder, the fact that the AI couldn't access the pathfinding code, and also performance). However, not all its features have been implemented. There is still a lot of things to do, but now that the new pathfinder is in, this work can be done.
On top of that, things that used to work, like formations, are not properly supported yet by the new pathfinder and are currently disabled. A lot of bugs that were fixed in the old implementation are likely to reappear in this new one.
What is still to be done?
- Already almost ready, but still not in:
Improve the grid update performance
- Coming soon:
Reenable formations
JPS cache
Remove the AI pathfinder
Discover and fix unit motion bugs introduced by the pathfinder change
- For the future:
A lot of things that are now possible!
What else can I learn about the new pathfinder?
A PDF, written by Philip and currently being updated by me when I have time, is here. (I should commit an updated version during the weekend)
You can also take a look at Philip's progress reports he wrote when working on this new pathfinder here.
What can I do?
You can help us by testing the game and giving some feedback! Please open Trac tickets only when you are 200% sure it is not already reported (see the list of open problems here), else post in the forums and we will do our possible to file the issue and try to fix it. We would like to have a not-too-buggy A19 despite including this huge change, which is not a simple objective. Please help us!
Тема: 0 A.D. - игра для любителей стратегий в реальном времени (Прочитано 98248 раз)
