Sometimes even great games have pathfinding problems cause it’s a hard thing to do, but in RTS games it’s UNACCEPTABLE !
When I heard that Supreme Commander’s developers made a revolutionary ‘new’ pathfinding called 'flowfield’ I had to check it out. The trailer demonstrating it was great, even if it looked a bit unrealistic cause of how all units were gliding over the terrain, it wasn’t a big issue.
Being a fan of the first game, I hated the changes they made in the second as much as any other supcom 1 fan but still, out of the curiosity, I decided to waste my money and get it.
The more I dig into the debug functions of supcom 2 the more I learned how it worked.
Finally once I understood, I said to myself : “ Hey this isn’t real pathfinding, it’s more like an avoiding algorithm , that’s probably why they removed the walls from the game ”
And that’s how it was, their pathfinding was a great idea, but it overly simplified and inaccurate.
Here is a test I did :
In that pic you can see how the unit goes inside the maze ( path illustrated with the red line ), works perfectly.
And there you see how it fails to go out properly, the incomplete flow field forces the unit to go through the buildings to get outside.
The reason why it does that is because, the flowfield isn’t fully generated and it doesn’t scan the whole map in order to find the correct path. It actually gives up if it doesn’t find the path soon enough.
So to get inside it has to go through the maze but to get out it just phases through? How realistic is that? But more importantly imagine the unfair advantage people get, closing the maze will make the unit go through it, leaving it open will force the unit follow the maze path.