How they love to phase though solid walls of rock, biometal, etc. I'll chase after them, only to end up with a crooked nose! Is there anything that can be done to fix this?
I know exactly whats hes talking about, I shot a video
28 secs long
1250 bitrate
mpg
low quality
4 MB
www.bzfiend.com/squirrel/Misc/video.mpg
video will be avaliable as soon as it uplaods..
Let's go back to the beginning, with BZ1. Created at a time when 486's were the top dogs, released to a world of Pentium 1's with blazing fast speeds like 120 and 233 mhz, and run on systems with two SLI'd Voodoo 2 cards to handle the stunning graphics. (that last part is true, btw, at the time it blew us away)
Unfortunately pathing had all of a couple of machine cycles and virtually no memory to work with, and had to handle wide open spaces, cliffs, mountains, and buildings as well as other vehicles. Anything could literally be anywhere, so the usual 'running on rails' like Quakebot did wouldn't work.
That's why the dreaded 'Scav Trap' exists in BZ1, the AI didn't have the brains to NOT get locked in a cycle when they got stuck.
Think about that...
Every AI unit would have been stuck permanently whenever one of them bumped a building. It's the same as a Scav trap.
SO, someone got the bright idea to let vehicles push THROUGH the buildings if push came to shove, to avoid having most of the AI trapped like flies inside all of the buildings.
Now comes BZ2, where yes we have much more power to toss at pathing and AI decisions, but the code base is still looking back to the time when we didn't, and vehicles HAD to push through buildings or the game would be ruined.
That's the history of the semi-phasic buildings in the BZ universe. I now consider it a property of biometal as the code doesn't seem to want to go away...
-Av-