Do Boffs have something against Wall - Doors?

geoff484 · September 2016

My new mission is ready to play minus one glitch. In a custom interior I use Wall - Door 03 and none of the boffs seem to want to walk through, I thought this might just be a foundry issue and published it. I tested it on the live server with my main and same thing.

Is there a work around for this or are the wall - doors pretty much forbidden?

gholendhor · September 2016

No this is a problem that creeps in on regular game play. Bridge officers sometime become stupid and won't go through doors. Most times you have to order them to a spot in the middle of the doorway, then reorder them to a point past the doorway. This might work about 80% of the time. the other 20% of the time they just don't want to go through the door.

duncanidaho11 · September 2016

I think the 80-20 decision will happen at a pretty high level too. My latest mission has 6 doors (door 03 I think) and only one has pathing issues and it's always the same one (which I think I've changed to another door type, still no joy.)

I haven't troubleshooted the problem in full, but one thing I might try playing around with it's what's going on beside the doors. The problem one has a lot of stuff around the far side. It's definitely not in the way but there is that structural difference.

If things are simply not working whatever you do, and it's a huge problem for the mission, a work around could be using the stand-alone door assets (ie. the ones with no walls) and building around them. The first step is easy, add door and two walls on either side, but you may need to use building block wall/column pieces (or some other asset) to fill in above the door and make the sides look nice.

thegreendragoon1 · September 2016

Bridge officers, and all other NPCs follow a set of pathing nodes that are automatically created when a Foundry mission is published. This means that prior to publish, NPCs have no pathing data and are likely to get stuck on everything. After publish though, there are a few things that can interfere with this pathing:

Sometimes there's just a quirk in the pathing or an object's position and shape creates an odd bottleneck. A repbublish or adjusting the door's position a little might fix this.
Any object that is affected by a trigger (i.e. set to become visible/invisible) will ignored by the pathing. (Pathing isn't dynamic and the engine errs on the side of anything that isn't always there, isn't there.)
On super rare occasions (assume it's something else unless it's been extensively tested) a bug will crop up that prevents an object from being calculated when the pathing is laid down.

tacofangs · September 2016

Yeah, pretty much what GD said.

While you, the player, have free will, and can walk/jump wherever you like, NPCS follow along paths between somewhat randomly placed nodes, we call "Beacons." Beacons are automatically generated on every map, in a process called Beaconizing (duh).

This beacons are generally a few feet apart from each other, and they all connect to others nearby to create a big web.

Here's a screenshot of our beacon debug viewing mode:

NPCS when going from one place to another, go to the beacon nearest them, and then follow the web of lines from one point to another to reach their goal.

Beacons are only drawn inside of playable geometry, starting from the spawn point outward. That's great in theory, but it means that if I (or another environment artist) leaves a gap or a hole someplace, the beacons can escape, and start flooding areas that the player (and NPCs) is never meant to get to.

Even without obvious holes, beacons are sneaky and still find their way out sometimes. There are bugs in the system, which cause beacons to connect to each other when they probably shouldn't.

In the image above, look at the blue and pink lines that are coming from the lower left and right of the image. Those lines converge on a point just left of my character in the doorway. But if you follow the lines, they cut through a bit of geometry. In this particular spot, the offense is pretty minor and your Boffs probably aren't going to get hung up on things. But there are places where it can be worse than that, or where there end up only being a single line to follow through the doorway. Those can end up causing more issues.

It's one reason why doors have to be as big as we make them. Even though they aren't a realistic human size, we need to make them big enough that the Beaconizer can find a path through them.

I know all of that doesn't necessarily solve anything for you. But as GD said, if you move some stuff around in the area, or re-publish, the new beacons might get put in slightly different spots, and connect through the door better.

Good luck!

entnx01 · September 2016

Taco, is this a problem on storyline/FE missions, as well? Facility 4028 seems to be the worst for this.

thegreendragoon1 · September 2016

tacofangs wrote: »

Cool! This is the first time I've actually gotten to see what the beacons look like. I imagine that unlike us, developers can go in and edit any problematic beacons.

tacofangs · September 2016

entnx01 wrote: »

Taco, is this a problem on storyline/FE missions, as well? Facility 4028 seems to be the worst for this.

Yes, this is how it works (and a potential problem) for every mission in the game, vs. every NPC in the game. This is not a Foundry thing. (The image above is from the Kinkuthanza Transport interior map.)

thegreendragoon1 wrote: »

tacofangs wrote: »

Cool! This is the first time I've actually gotten to see what the beacons look like. I imagine that unlike us, developers can go in and edit any problematic beacons.

Uh. . . yeah, not really. We have a couple of tools that we can use to affect beacons in broad strokes, but we have no way to select a particular line and tell it not to draw there. For the most part, we use the same things mentioned above: adjust the geo, rebeaconize.

In answer to both of you, this is essentially how the ESD Shuttlebay Logout trick works. Beacons have escaped containment on ESD. (I still haven't figured out how). So you nuzzle up next to a wall, and log out, when you log back in, you get moved to the nearest beacon, which happens to be on the other side of a wall. . .

markhawkman · September 2016

don't some of the opening and closing doors get beaconed as if they were always closed? Or did that get fixed?

tacofangs · September 2016

Anything animated (like doors that open/close) basically don't exist to the beaconizer. Maybe there was a bug? Or maybe on a mission, the door started off locked (so it had solid collision), and then swapped to something that opened? That could cause it not to beaconize beyond the door.

markhawkman · September 2016

It might be the size. These were the tiny doors. You mentioned that the beaconizer has size issues and these were the doors that are actual door-size and not barn size.

yeah the screenshot is old, I should probably double check actually.

duncanidaho11 · September 2016

thegreendragoon1 wrote: »

Any object that is affected by a trigger (i.e. set to become visible/invisible) will ignored by the pathing. (Pathing isn't dynamic and the engine errs on the side of anything that isn't always there, isn't there.)

tacofangs wrote: »

Anything animated (like doors that open/close) basically don't exist to the beaconizer. Maybe there was a bug? Or maybe on a mission, the door started off locked (so it had solid collision), and then swapped to something that opened? That could cause it not to beaconize beyond the door.

That seems to covers my issue, the door in question takes the place of a non-working door/wall prop on a trigger. Tonight I'm going to try simply hiding that door behind it's nonworking counterpart, rather than spawning it in.

antonine3258 · September 2016

Taco - that was a really interesting behind-the-scenes look - I was wondering why sometimes the boffs have 'points' they sort of stop at when following. (The New Link is a perennial offender, with boffs gathering at the top of the hill above the last fighting area instead of heading in)

thegreendragoon1 · September 2016

duncanidaho11 wrote: »

That seems to covers my issue, the door in question takes the place of a non-working door/wall prop on a trigger. Tonight I'm going to try simply hiding that door behind it's nonworking counterpart, rather than spawning it in.

This is what I've been doing and the results work reasonably well. I tried a while back to create a "frame" for the door with invisible walls, but I could never get it to behave quite right.

I suppose the proper solution would be to get the door and door frame as separate objects so we only have to swap the the door itself instead of the whole frame.

markhawkman · September 2016

we DO have a door prop that's just an opening and closing door

geoff484 · September 2016

I tried that one, same results

markhawkman · September 2016

Well, as Taco mentioned, small doors don't work well with the beaconizer.

geoff484 · September 2016

Yeah, Im just gonna with a pre-existing map

trennan · September 2016

tacofangs wrote: »

Yeah, pretty much what GD said.

While you, the player, have free will, and can walk/jump wherever you like, NPCS follow along paths between somewhat randomly placed nodes, we call "Beacons." Beacons are automatically generated on every map, in a process called Beaconizing (duh).

This beacons are generally a few feet apart from each other, and they all connect to others nearby to create a big web.

Here's a screenshot of our beacon debug viewing mode:

NPCS when going from one place to another, go to the beacon nearest them, and then follow the web of lines from one point to another to reach their goal.

Beacons are only drawn inside of playable geometry, starting from the spawn point outward. That's great in theory, but it means that if I (or another environment artist) leaves a gap or a hole someplace, the beacons can escape, and start flooding areas that the player (and NPCs) is never meant to get to.

Even without obvious holes, beacons are sneaky and still find their way out sometimes. There are bugs in the system, which cause beacons to connect to each other when they probably shouldn't.

In the image above, look at the blue and pink lines that are coming from the lower left and right of the image. Those lines converge on a point just left of my character in the doorway. But if you follow the lines, they cut through a bit of geometry. In this particular spot, the offense is pretty minor and your Boffs probably aren't going to get hung up on things. But there are places where it can be worse than that, or where there end up only being a single line to follow through the doorway. Those can end up causing more issues.

It's one reason why doors have to be as big as we make them. Even though they aren't a realistic human size, we need to make them big enough that the Beaconizer can find a path through them.

I know all of that doesn't necessarily solve anything for you. But as GD said, if you move some stuff around in the area, or re-publish, the new beacons might get put in slightly different spots, and connect through the door better.

Good luck!

My question here is. Since you can work on the beacons. Why not set permanent door beacons? One on one side of the door and one on the other side of the door. Then when a door is set, all pathing beacons on either side of the door connect to these two beacons. That way, there is only One path through the door. But the beacon web on either side is still just as crazy it is in the picture.

tacofangs · September 2016

trennan wrote: »

tacofangs wrote: »

Yeah, pretty much what GD said.

While you, the player, have free will, and can walk/jump wherever you like, NPCS follow along paths between somewhat randomly placed nodes, we call "Beacons." Beacons are automatically generated on every map, in a process called Beaconizing (duh).

This beacons are generally a few feet apart from each other, and they all connect to others nearby to create a big web.

Here's a screenshot of our beacon debug viewing mode:

NPCS when going from one place to another, go to the beacon nearest them, and then follow the web of lines from one point to another to reach their goal.

Beacons are only drawn inside of playable geometry, starting from the spawn point outward. That's great in theory, but it means that if I (or another environment artist) leaves a gap or a hole someplace, the beacons can escape, and start flooding areas that the player (and NPCs) is never meant to get to.

Even without obvious holes, beacons are sneaky and still find their way out sometimes. There are bugs in the system, which cause beacons to connect to each other when they probably shouldn't.

In the image above, look at the blue and pink lines that are coming from the lower left and right of the image. Those lines converge on a point just left of my character in the doorway. But if you follow the lines, they cut through a bit of geometry. In this particular spot, the offense is pretty minor and your Boffs probably aren't going to get hung up on things. But there are places where it can be worse than that, or where there end up only being a single line to follow through the doorway. Those can end up causing more issues.

It's one reason why doors have to be as big as we make them. Even though they aren't a realistic human size, we need to make them big enough that the Beaconizer can find a path through them.

I know all of that doesn't necessarily solve anything for you. But as GD said, if you move some stuff around in the area, or re-publish, the new beacons might get put in slightly different spots, and connect through the door better.

Good luck!

My question here is. Since you can work on the beacons. Why not set permanent door beacons? One on one side of the door and one on the other side of the door. Then when a door is set, all pathing beacons on either side of the door connect to these two beacons. That way, there is only One path through the door. But the beacon web on either side is still just as crazy it is in the picture.

As I said before, we don't have any way to control or adjust the placement of beacons. There are no special door beacons, or any other special kinds of beacons. They are automatically generated, and that's that.

I can talk with Software about ways to improve things, but none of that exists at the moment.

markhawkman · September 2016

BTW, I shared your wisdom with the guys on the Neverwinter forum: http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1222983/new-lead-mimicking-talks-about-foundry

trennan · September 2016

tacofangs wrote: »

trennan wrote: »

tacofangs wrote: »

Yeah, pretty much what GD said.

While you, the player, have free will, and can walk/jump wherever you like, NPCS follow along paths between somewhat randomly placed nodes, we call "Beacons." Beacons are automatically generated on every map, in a process called Beaconizing (duh).

This beacons are generally a few feet apart from each other, and they all connect to others nearby to create a big web.

Here's a screenshot of our beacon debug viewing mode:

NPCS when going from one place to another, go to the beacon nearest them, and then follow the web of lines from one point to another to reach their goal.

Beacons are only drawn inside of playable geometry, starting from the spawn point outward. That's great in theory, but it means that if I (or another environment artist) leaves a gap or a hole someplace, the beacons can escape, and start flooding areas that the player (and NPCs) is never meant to get to.

Even without obvious holes, beacons are sneaky and still find their way out sometimes. There are bugs in the system, which cause beacons to connect to each other when they probably shouldn't.

In the image above, look at the blue and pink lines that are coming from the lower left and right of the image. Those lines converge on a point just left of my character in the doorway. But if you follow the lines, they cut through a bit of geometry. In this particular spot, the offense is pretty minor and your Boffs probably aren't going to get hung up on things. But there are places where it can be worse than that, or where there end up only being a single line to follow through the doorway. Those can end up causing more issues.

It's one reason why doors have to be as big as we make them. Even though they aren't a realistic human size, we need to make them big enough that the Beaconizer can find a path through them.

I know all of that doesn't necessarily solve anything for you. But as GD said, if you move some stuff around in the area, or re-publish, the new beacons might get put in slightly different spots, and connect through the door better.

Good luck!

My question here is. Since you can work on the beacons. Why not set permanent door beacons? One on one side of the door and one on the other side of the door. Then when a door is set, all pathing beacons on either side of the door connect to these two beacons. That way, there is only One path through the door. But the beacon web on either side is still just as crazy it is in the picture.

As I said before, we don't have any way to control or adjust the placement of beacons. There are no special door beacons, or any other special kinds of beacons. They are automatically generated, and that's that.

I can talk with Software about ways to improve things, but none of that exists at the moment.

It would be much appreciated by all if you did. Especially if you came up with a way to set door beacons. I'm not asking for an overall pathing map for all of them, just for doors. I don't know how many times I've had to stop in the middle of a mission, just to use rally point to get Boffs through a door.

And I'm not even going to go in to the randomness of what the boffs in the foundry do. We can leave that alone. It's like the comic relief in the hours of time spent working on something.

Edit:
Speaking of the Rally Point. Perhaps look in to the possibility of setting permanent door rally points, of sorts, for boffs? That way at a door the boffs know to go to point A and then move along this path to point B. Of course this might be more of modified Reach Marker, for the Rally Point.

Do Boffs have something against Wall - Doors?

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