December 18, 2019
War Stories
How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding
How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Solved Pathfinding | War Stories | Ars Technica
By: Ars Technica
Working on Pathfinding
Pathfinding, especially in a dynamic sense, is still a relatively expensive process to run. This is much more so when you are trying to apply it to a lot of units.
Tiberian Sun was running into a lot of issues they called “Artificial Idiocy”, which is when your AI just does really dumb stuff. Really illogical AI from a player’s game units very quickly make the player mad and aggitated. They say “If you spend more time making sure it doesn’t do something stupid, it will actually look pretty smart”. And to follow up, they didn’t need perfect pathfinding, they just needed “not stupid” pathfinding.
Some of their fixes included not accounting for the collision of other friendly units selected to move and wiggling stationary friendly units when encountered by moving friendly units. Not accounting for other selected friendly units made sense since most likely they would also be going to about the same place and would generally be out of each others’ ways. The wiggling was added as very simple to execute logic in hopes that it would “unlock” a path previously obstructed by the stationary units.
SUMMARY
This was just a cool video I stumbled upon pretty randomly. It was very interesting to see some of the “behind the scenes” for one of my first favorite computer games to play a long time ago. There are just so many things you take for granted that took a lot of hard work and were almost revolutionary for their time.
It is also interesting to see that some problems still exist to a degree, like the prcoessing intensity of dynamic pathfinding. I think my research in pathfinding recently is what brought this video recommendation to me on Youtube, so I have at least had a small taste of the pains they went through developing that. I also really like their thoughts on just minimizing the terrible choices of AI instead of maximizing its “smart” moments to make it nicer to work with and really look smarter in the end.