Flow Field Pathfinding

One of the few things that SupCom 2 actually did right was the flow field pathfinding.

It really turned massive battles into fantastically orchestrated dances of units.

Like so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxk2_SDEzNs


I think it could suit Planetary Annihilation well.

What do you guys think?

Confirmed and they said implemented as a next generation of Flow Field!

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ?context=3

**** YEAH!

I would say, it depends on how much of a design challenge that ends up being. Having taken a few minutes to research the subject on the web, it certainly seems plausible that they could come up with this but I can't even hazard a guess as to how many man hours are likely to be needed to design this as a feature.

That being said, they said they're going to do it, so no doubt they know more about the subject than I do and think they can handle it.

Glad to hear this Flow field was one of those features I miss whenever I go back to play Forged Alliance. The only problem is that it has a very "slidey" mechanical feel to it. I mean, I know these are robots, but often times it felt like they were gliding around on ice. Still, they said it was the next generation of flow field, and now that it's had time to mature, hopefully they've worked the kinks out and polished it up a bit. Flow field was one of the best things to happen to RTS's in a while, it just needed a little spiffing up. Glad to see it's making it into PA

Not unless they fix it. As far as I'm concerned what ended up in SupCom2 was half baked.

Flow Field(Henceforth FF) has some aspects that are an improvement over traditional pathfinding because the Paths and movements aren't calculated in isolation, allowing groups to navigate as a 'group' at all times and easily account for other units that are part of different 'groups' and making it overall a easier to give movement orders.

BUT, there are consequences, based on the implementation in SupCom2 there are some really not great things it does;

-Unrealistic unit movement, and I don't mean something like "amg the turn arc isn't quite right!!!11!!one!!" I mean units literally slide sideways.
-Clipping, units will shameless clip with units, like some kind of dopey Venn Diagram, leaving them mega vulnerable to AOE weapons
-Loss of Crushing, it's hard to crush an enemy unit when it slides right out of the way of you giant bot crushing feet.

And prolly more I've forgotten since I last played SupCom2

Mike

Like I said, it has that "sliding on ice" feel to it. They said it was the next generation though, so hopefully they've polished it up by now.

Yeah flow field needed some tweaking so the bouncing, especially for tracked vehicles, could be mitigated, but seriously, it's still by far top of its class.

No other RTS has pathfinding that comes close.

EDIT: Okay, that opinion is a little outdated, the new Total War and StarCrap games do have blob pathfinding of some sort. StarCrap still has the same issue that its units need to stand still to fire, and roll dice to hit, so it doesn't really count because there isn't that much of a flow, more of a stop and go.

Yeah, most RTS's have the Roomba-style pathfinding.

"Am I there? No, that's a wall... *back up, go forward, hit other unit, back up, go forward* Am I there? That's a rock... *Back up, go forward, hit rock right next to it, back up, go forward...*"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfNrgymu ... age#t=295s

Flow Fields ftw

According to what I found on Google about the subject the idea of Flow Field Pathfinding evolved out of some research done at University of Washington in 2010. If I am understanding this correctly they were working on modeling crowd behavior more accurately.

http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/

The algorithm and concept seems to have been snatched up by game developers and further refined and used in several games since including apparently SC2. Looks like good stuff to me. I haven't looked closely enough to see how much technical information there is available about the actual code and algorithm used to do this.

Starcraft is an RTT.

But okay, you're right. Other games have come close, and have surpassed it.

This ^^

officially Starcraft is an RTS, as stated on wikipedia.

In an RTT you cant place your own buildings, you just get a set of units.
I.e. Ruse or World in Conflict.

So Starcraft is something in between an RTT and an RTS. It's a micro RTS.

I don't think Starcraft is even close to flow field. Flow field involves units being aware of and reacting to each other before they come in contact. Starcraft looks more just like units push each other, with a nice little animation as the pushed unit is moved.

It looks pretty good in Starcraft, but then again units are also inertia-less, with infinite accel/deceleration and rotation, so pushing doesn't really look any different than ordinary movement.

Units are pushy in the more recent version of the Spring engine also but it tends to look much worse.

It does use flowfield, I think I read about it somewhere.
Also imho the overall crowd-movement of SC2 looks kinda like the Movement in SupCom2

Frankly, between the two, I'd rather have SCII's movement over SupCom2's.

Mike

I'd rather units that got where they were meant to go than units which just bumped each other all day long.

Flowfield doesn't necessarily mean sliding units.