Pathing After Recent Foundry Down Time

rekurzion

Before the most recent down time and republish of missions to accommodate the new Top 3 system I never got any complaints/feedback about pathing issues on my mission. Since I have gotten 4 reviews (within 1 week) stating the pathing is jacked up and preventing normal play without micromanaging BOFF's.

I haven't had a chance to replay my mission yet so I still need to see for myself.

Has anyone else had an issue with pathing on a their mission when this wasn't a problem pre Top 3?

drogyn1701

Do you know what, specifically, is the issue? For example: are the boffs having trouble navigating through a door? I've seen that happen pre-patch, but it was inconsistent. Would happen one playthrough, but not on the next of the same mission.

I may be having a problem with one of my missions where boffs are suddenly falling through a floor. Could be related.

markhawkman

did you republish recently?

rekurzion

I did republish to get my mission visible on the Top 3 (which has done wonders for getting plays - great system) but again I haven't played the mission yet since republish. Probably will tonight to see if I can get the behavior I'm hearing. but I've gotten reviews that mention getting stuck on doors and turns.

For reference the map I'm hearing people having trouble on is one where I used one of the federation ship interior but layered my own walls to change the scenery. I did this specifically to avoid pathing issues when creating an indoor map with halls/doors from scratch.

But in 1 month of testing both in the editor and published and nearly 6 months of plays before this recent republish with no complaints and then 4 in one week makes me wonder...

thegreendragoon1

rekurzion wrote: »

I did republish to get my mission visible on the Top 3 (which has done wonders for getting plays - great system) but again I haven't played the mission yet since republish. Probably will tonight to see if I can get the behavior I'm hearing. but I've gotten reviews that mention getting stuck on doors and turns.

For reference the map I'm hearing people having trouble on is one where I used one of the federation ship interior but layered my own walls to change the scenery. I did this specifically to avoid pathing issues when creating an indoor map with halls/doors from scratch.

But in 1 month of testing both in the editor and published and nearly 6 months of plays before this recent republish with no complaints and then 4 in one week makes me wonder...

May I ask, do you use any of the Starfleet automatically opening/closing doors? If so, do you ever trigger (make visible/invisible) these doors?

Really, knowing exactly where the pathing is running into problems will make it far easier to diagnose.

borrowedtune

My initial thought was the same... manual publish/door issues/etc. But I think there might be more to this.

I've recently been tweaking my missions for the Top 3 and have been running them for testing. Today, I noticed 2 things in "A Taste of Collateral Damage" (ST-HPMDJ5JQR).

First... pathing does seem a little wonky at times. There are pathing issues where none used to be. And I didn't tweak or update anything on these maps.

Second... I noticed some really fast load screens. Like, REALLY fast. A couple seconds, at most. Sounds awesome, right? Maybe. Maybe not if this is causing maps to not write correct pathing upon load.

This issue should probably be posted in the Foundry bugs forum so we can be sure crypticfrost sees this.

rekurzion

borrowedtune wrote: »

My initial thought was the same... manual publish/door issues/etc. But I think there might be more to this.

I've recently been tweaking my missions for the Top 3 and have been running them for testing. Today, I noticed 2 things in "A Taste of Collateral Damage" (ST-HPMDJ5JQR).

First... pathing does seem a little wonky at times. There are pathing issues where none used to be. And I didn't tweak or update anything on these maps.

Second... I noticed some really fast load screens. Like, REALLY fast. A couple seconds, at most. Sounds awesome, right? Maybe. Maybe not if this is causing maps to not write correct pathing upon load.

This issue should probably be posted in the Foundry bugs forum so we can be sure crypticfrost sees this.

I'll create a post in the Bug forum and link to this thread.

To the question on federation doors, no I don't use them...again because they are so small and generally cause my BOFFs to act like Kelly Bundy going through a rotary door.

borrowedtune

drogyn1701 wrote: »

I may be having a problem with one of my missions where boffs are suddenly falling through a floor. Could be related.

I forgot to confirm this. It's happening in one of my missions, too. Boffs are getting stuck in a triggered horizontal forcefield (The Omega Fallout ST-HO39X8MNZ).

I know this sort of thing has always been dicey, with triggered stuff, so who knows... but it does seem much worse than it used to be (or should be).

drogyn1701

I need to test mine more, I'm just going off player reports at the moment. I recently changed the mission. It used to have a whole section of a custom map (skycastle) that would appear and then disappear. This creates pathing problems if there are floors and ceilings that aren't there when the map loads. This is a known thing. To get around that, I placed some of the new invisible floors where the actual floor will spawn in and out, so it'll calculate a hard surface there when the map loads. It's possible something in this is still causing trouble. Or maybe not.

pwecaptainsmirk

I am going to move this over to the bug report section.

Thank you for putting in details about how this is affecting your missions.

~Smirk

thegreendragoon1

rekurzion wrote: »

I'll create a post in the Bug forum and link to this thread.

To the question on federation doors, no I don't use them...again because they are so small and generally cause my BOFFs to act like Kelly Bundy going through a rotary door.

On rare occasions I've seen times were a map will fail to have pathing post-publish. Try republishing and see if the the problem resolves.

borrowedtune wrote: »

I forgot to confirm this. It's happening in one of my missions, too. Boffs are getting stuck in a triggered horizontal forcefield (The Omega Fallout ST-HO39X8MNZ).

I know this sort of thing has always been dicey, with triggered stuff, so who knows... but it does seem much worse than it used to be (or should be).

This is a limitation of the engine. When pathing is calculated (during publish) it ignores any objects that have triggers on them. You're boffs are falling through because the pathing doesn't realize there is a floor there.

borrowedtune

I think I may have narrowed down the cause of this... or at least have a better working theory.

I did a run through of The Omega Fallout (ST-HO39X8MNZ) tonight. This is an old mission but I recently made a few changes. Most of the stuff was very minor... a couple costume updates and fixing some text/object titles. However, I did do some rather extensive work on one particular map (the aforementioned "horizontal forcefield" map) that involved adding some new assets and trigger work.

What happened during the playthrough on holodeck is that this one map "insta-loaded." The load screen lasted maybe 2 seconds. No other map acted this way and had normal, extended foundry style loading times. There are no bugs on any of the other maps... only this one.

Of note, the first thing I noticed acting strange was actually nothing I had touched in editing (mastiffs were getting out of their cage).

So... maybe something's up with maps that have been edited and published after the last patch.

borrowedtune

thegreendragoon1 wrote: »

This is a limitation of the engine. When pathing is calculated (during publish) it ignores any objects that have triggers on them. You're boffs are falling through because the pathing doesn't realize there is a floor there.

I doubt there are many foundry authors that have a better understanding and working knowledge of states/triggers than me... including their limitations.

I only say this just to make sure we're all on the same page.

crypticfrost

I'll investigate.

rekurzion

I was able to get feedback from players on where the issue was arising.

In my mission I have a raised floor (about shoulder height of an average NPC) in the middle of a room. The floor has a hole in the middle where a projector, placed on ground level, shines through. The floor and the entire room is metallic so in order to create a circular hole I used the smallest metallic floor panels to create the effect. A players boff's are getting stuck near the hole unable to move. Because of flickering when layering objects I use the 0.0001 rule for height, this might be causing a problem (i've seen some instances where a slightly elevated object can cause a player to be unable to move forward or jump).

The other instance is in a doorway on the same map. I used an existing federation interior map but coated the floors, roof and walls to create a fully metallic sterile looking room. The facility was meant to be fully automated so to create the effect I wanted the doors appear as walls until you reach a marker which triggers the walls to hide allowing you to walk through. There is some pathing issues here players have noticed having their boff's walk through the opening.