Pathing (Fear pathing, possible tool) discussion.

[Derision]

Originally Posted by narcberry

Isn't Derision getting that information from the map files? Or (Derision) are you just showing how you can manually build paths?

To clarify,

The tool I am working on right now is to enable the existing waypoints on grids that are used by roaming mobs to be corrected such that mobs don't attempt
to path under the world, through the air or through walls. You are correct, this is a manual process, although I hope to put enough features in the tool to make
this as painless a process as possible. My BestZ fix just tried to hide a part of this problem. The aim of this tool is to be able to fix the problem at source (in the database).

There is an existing tool that FNW wrote, Apathing, which takes these roaming grids and other information and interconnects them into one large grid, the idea being that this can be used for fear pathing and other general pathing problems (i.e. you aggro a mob, how does it get to you other than running straight at you).

The purpose of my tool is enable the grids used for roaming to be 'fixed' so that Apathing can use these to create a good interconnected grid that will hopefully work well for fear and any other uses it could be put to.

Once this tool is done, it is my intention to create another (or maybe an extension of the same one) to visualise and tweak the Apathing generated grid for fear pathing. I really only need one zone with fixed roaming grids before I can move on to that.

There is already some code in the emulator to use the path files that Apathing creates, although it has some issues, maybe due to bad waypoint info, maybe some bugs, probably a combination of the two. Search for #ifdef FEAR_PATHING in the zone source.