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Latest Patch and My Map

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Hi there, I made a thread about this once before and I was basically told to remake my entire map so I am asking in a different forum (hopefully it is a relevant topic here)

(Edited with new information)

I have to play my AoS on 1.24 because updating to anything after 1.24e (1.25a and beyond) screws up the pathfinding for all units. They can't understand when something is blocked off, like a wall of trees, and so they just run into it instead of going around. It's an enormous problem for AI heroes and automatic faction troops as you might imagine. It's literally unplayable and I'm tired of playing on some outdated version.

I tried making a copy of the map and saving that copy with the 1.27 editor but it appears to be the same editor version (6059) and as I feared, this changed nothing. I'm really at a loss for what to do. This map has been a passion project since 2005 and there's no way I could possibly rebuild it...it's huge.

Please help if you can, its very frustrating. I will rep anyone who can help for their time.
 
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I barely understood a thing on that page. I cant remember when the patches after 1.24e were released, but this map has barely used any jass systems created by other users. And only recently. My point - this has been a problem for years.
 
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Isn't having people experience your map the point of mapping? Unless you're worried about stuff being stolen (a bit silly since there are like 12 mappers left and they all know of each other), or one of those people who never want to show works in progress (perhaps a bit more reasonable).
 
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Isn't having people experience your map the point of mapping? Unless you're worried about stuff being stolen (a bit silly since there are like 12 mappers left and they all know of each other), or one of those people who never want to show works in progress (perhaps a bit more reasonable).

You're right, I understand, it probably does seem silly. It's just not done yet tho. There are still bugs to fix and it's slow since I'm the only one working on it. Was originally my brother's project in 2005 but he abandoned it years ago.

Actually, I don't even know the map submission rules or if it could be uploaded and shared here anyway. I'd like to. I really think people would love this. Unfortunately I do not have a list of credits and have edited some models (ie changing color, or making something additive for a ghost).

...And yeah, I do like to show a finished product. I feel the "twitter style" of updates is less professional and diminishes excitement and value very quickly.
 

Dr Super Good

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I have to play my AoS on 1.24 because updating to anything after 1.24e (1.25a and beyond) screws up the pathfinding for all units. They can't understand when something is blocked off, like a wall of trees, and so they just run into it instead of going around. It's an enormous problem for AI heroes and automatic faction troops as you might imagine. It's literally unplayable and I'm tired of playing on some outdated version.
The pathing map file format has not changed since RoC beta. Pathing should work fine when the same map is loaded in 1.24 and 1.27.

Unless you have to resave the map, in which case you have run into the infamous "no pathing" bug. Basically the editor is responsible for compiling the base pathing map, including adding pathing for cliffs, ramps, unbuildable tiles, shallow water, deep water, doodads (not destructables), bridge destructable pathing map exclusion area (special case where it clears base pathing map under a destructable) and map boarder, so if it decides not to build that pathing map correctly land units can practically walk everywhere. Destructables (normal trees) are handled at run time by using a pathing map overlay similar to buildings which adds exclusions to the base pathing map. Adding/removing doodads or changing terrain usually gets the editor to rebuild the pathing map at some stage.

If that is not the problem then here are potentially other causes. Units which are given "no collision" by triggers, potentially erroneously, will completely ignore both base and overlayed pathing hazards and so can walk everywhere. The base pathing map can be modified 1 cell at a time by triggers, turning off or adding obstructions. If the map is set to use latest WC3 patch data then the destructable the trees, or other obstructions, were based on might have changed and somehow corrupted the pathing map field. Flying, amphibious and water units may ignore land pathing obstructions.
 
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The pathing map file format has not changed since RoC beta. Pathing should work fine when the same map is loaded in 1.24 and 1.27.

Unless you have to resave the map, in which case you have run into the infamous "no pathing" bug. Basically the editor is responsible for compiling the base pathing map, including adding pathing for cliffs, ramps, unbuildable tiles, shallow water, deep water, doodads (not destructables), bridge destructable pathing map exclusion area (special case where it clears base pathing map under a destructable) and map boarder, so if it decides not to build that pathing map correctly land units can practically walk everywhere. Destructables (normal trees) are handled at run time by using a pathing map overlay similar to buildings which adds exclusions to the base pathing map. Adding/removing doodads or changing terrain usually gets the editor to rebuild the pathing map at some stage.

If that is not the problem then here are potentially other causes. Units which are given "no collision" by triggers, potentially erroneously, will completely ignore both base and overlayed pathing hazards and so can walk everywhere. The base pathing map can be modified 1 cell at a time by triggers, turning off or adding obstructions. If the map is set to use latest WC3 patch data then the destructable the trees, or other obstructions, were based on might have changed and somehow corrupted the pathing map field. Flying, amphibious and water units may ignore land pathing obstructions.

That sounds like if you gave everything the ghost ability. I'll try and clarify a bit. Imagine you have a forest and you press P in the editor to see the pathing blocked by it (the purple cells). All of that still exists when playing on 1.25a or higher. Units aren't walking *through* things, they just get tunnel vision and have no idea how to go around them. A unit will just slam into the wall and be like "why can't I get around this wall?" instead of looking for the nearest solution to go around said wall. As soon as I patch down to 1.24e, everything works the way it should.

So unless you guided your units everywhere around the map (effectively rendering minimap useless) you'll just crash into everything and never get to your destination
 

Dr Super Good

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That sounds like if you gave everything the ghost ability. I'll try and clarify a bit. Imagine you have a forest and you press P in the editor to see the pathing blocked by it (the purple cells). All of that still exists when playing on 1.25a or higher. Units aren't walking *through* things, they just get tunnel vision and have no idea how to go around them. A unit will just slam into the wall and be like "why can't I get around this wall?" instead of looking for the nearest solution to go around said wall. As soon as I patch down to 1.24e, everything works the way it should.

So unless you guided your units everywhere around the map (effectively rendering minimap useless) you'll just crash into everything and never get to your destination
Never heard of this happening before. I will need to see it for myself to even have a clue what it might be.
 
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If you're unwilling to share the map, I suppose create a short video in a working and unworking patch. Although the idea that someone would steal your map is preposterous , but I won't hold caution against you. :p
 
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Hey there's a good idea, I need more of those. ;) Here we are:


So as you can see in 1.24e (or whatever) he does exactly what you'd expect. Any version higher than that and he just butts against the trees like a dumbass. I made an important discovery while making this video though - and you can see for yourself - it doesn't seem to happen on cliffs. I realized most of the barriers in my map are trees, and there are very few cliffs in comparison.
 

Dr Super Good

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I think there might be a 1-2 cell wide path in those trees which the unit is trying to use but cannot because the unit's collision is too big. Unlike StarCraft II, collision is not factored in with pathing so units will stupidly try to squeeze through gaps they are to fat to fit through. Why it suddenly appears between 1.24 and 1.24e+ might be because of an underlying pathing change with some element that is used, or maybe with the search algorithms.

Without the map I cannot say for sure. However in the 1.27 editor try changing to terrain pallet, disabling doodad overlay and enable pathing overlay and checking what the pathing map is doing in that area of the map.

If you still have problems it might be a good idea to send me the map privately for further investigation.

EDIT:
Looks like they changed something with the pathfinder between 1.24 and 1.24e. The pathing map might be too complex now for it to correctly plot routes around. This might especially apply to pathing overlays, which there might be too many (due to huge destructable density) so it messes up.

Try deleting absolutely every doodad and destructable so it is just the terrain and units left (make backup before). If the pathing around whatever empty shell of a map that is left works perfectly then the map must be running into some pathing complexity based limit with the current version of WC3.

If that still does not work try deleting all triggers. This would rule out some system interacting with the pathfinding somehow.

This is a really interesting issue, possibly worthy of posting in the lab.
 
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I made a copy and deleted all dest/doodads, and it works fine. But that's kind of a given in my opinion since we already established cliffs aren't causing it. I can't delete 7026 doodads and redraw them lol what am I going to do now? Am I just screwed because the core of this map was created in like 2004 or something? Sort of like how there are maps from that era that literally do not run anymore. This is very upsetting because if Blizz ever gets around to making additional (and hopefully better) patches besides 1.27 I want to be there for that.
 

Dr Super Good

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Replace all trees with doodads? Unless you need destructable trees, doodads are far more efficient. The pathing for doodads is compiled into the base pathing file as opposed to destructables which are overlaid onto that at run time. It could be that the game cannot cope with so many pathing overlays anymore, possibly due to an optimization or some unintended change between 1.24 and 1.24e.
 
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Replace all trees with doodads? Unless you need destructable trees, doodads are far more efficient. The pathing for doodads is compiled into the base pathing file as opposed to destructables which are overlaid onto that at run time. It could be that the game cannot cope with so many pathing overlays anymore, possibly due to an optimization or some unintended change between 1.24 and 1.24e.

Several heroes harvest lumber and triggers are involved too. I doubt the number of trees is the issue since I have another map with likely more than this one and I've never seen this issue on another map
 

Dr Super Good

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Several heroes harvest lumber and triggers are involved too. I doubt the number of trees is the issue since I have another map with likely more than this one and I've never seen this issue on another map
Except is it as dense with as many holes in the pathing? Just because the map is old does not mean WC3 treats it any differently if you save it with a recent version of WE.
 
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If I open a melee map the forests aren't going to be completely air tight either though. That one spot I showed in the video actually does have a weird "broken" cliff underneath the trees, but this issue happens all over the map so fixing that won't help other areas

As for the other map I had to draw loooots of pathing blockers on that one. I was able to do that since they couldn't be chopped down
 
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Basically, is it that warcraft path finding will have a distance limit? I mean they check by distance, it will be more expensive if you plot a far away location.
Distance is not an issue, which is clearly shown in my video. If your destination is 300 away but there are trees in front of you the unit suddenly has no idea what to do and says "hmm i'll try running INTO the wall"
 
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Distance is not an issue, which is clearly shown in my video. If your destination is 300 away but there are trees in front of you the unit suddenly has no idea what to do and says "hmm i'll try running INTO the wall"

That is true, however the more advanced check being the path of the side, I noticed when a curve path was being checked, there was a limit, since the new check probably has a limit to reduce lag which only Blizzard Entertainment knows of. if I want to optimize a game with 1000 units I would probably set a limit.
 
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Yeah I guess, im just still at an impasse :\ the thing that confuses me is I've literally never encountered this bug on ANY other map. Never heard anyone else encounter it either. I am completely confident there is a legion of maps with a greater amount of trees/destructibles/etc. placed in close proximity. That's why this is confusing. More so when you don't really know what you're looking for
 

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If I open a melee map the forests aren't going to be completely air tight either though.
But they are also more spaced apart with generally bigger and more open areas inbetween forests.

If your destination is 300 away but there are trees in front of you the unit suddenly has no idea what to do and says "hmm i'll try running INTO the wall"
Either it thinks there is a valid path through the trees, or it fails to find a path around them so goes in a straight line (as if you were on a pathing island).

That is not the only strange path finding issue. If you order units around the buggy tree patches they start to hug the trees. This literally means they will walk perpendicular to the direction you ordered just to remain close to the trees even though their destination exactly straight ahead of them. They then precede to rotate 90-180 degrees to start walking straight (ish) to the end point.

My only explanation is that the map has reached some sort of new path finding complexity limit (on which did not exist in 1.24 but did in 1.24e). The search algorithms are failing badly under these conditions, being unable to find routes around some trivial obstructions and glitching what should be straight paths...

Try removing all triggers, this rules out any trigger interaction. Try cutting out 3/4 of the map so there is just the buggy pathing area to check if it is complexity related.

I have seen things like this happen in WC3 maps before. However it is very rare and often limited to small areas of a map to the point one thinks it might be once-off. However this map has a serious problem.
 
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But they are also more spaced apart with generally bigger and more open areas inbetween forests.

That is true

That is not the only strange path finding issue. If you order units around the buggy tree patches they start to hug the trees. This literally means they will walk perpendicular to the direction you ordered just to remain close to the trees even though their destination exactly straight ahead of them. They then precede to rotate 90-180 degrees to start walking straight (ish) to the end point.

I'm glad you noticed that, I didn't know how to explain it but yes that is extremely bad too. That's actually how I noticed it first because all the Alliance troops do that on the bottom path as they get ready to turn the corner.

I have seen things like this happen in WC3 maps before. However it is very rare and often limited to small areas of a map to the point one thinks it might be once-off. However this map has a serious problem.

Really? That's nuts. Very interesting about small pockets of bugged space, I know where one of them is in that case right off the top of my head...

Also, yeah I wouldn't be surprised by that. Sometimes I can't believe it runs after all it's been through. It was originally my brother's project, which is honestly where a lot of its issues came from.

Try removing all triggers, this rules out any trigger interaction. Try cutting out 3/4 of the map so there is just the buggy pathing area to check if it is complexity related.

So, I'm not sure if this is good or bad relative to the different potential causes. After removing all the triggers, it works perfectly. Couldn't hardly believe it at first.

Edit: sorry I just meant I was working on it real quick.
 
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Dr Super Good

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After removing all the triggers, it works perfectly. Couldn't hardly believe it at first.
So the problem is caused by the triggers? This would make sense in a kind of perverse way.

The behaviour of some of the trigger systems may have changed between 1.24 and 1.24e. The result is that what used to work perfectly no longer works and is somehow breaking the path finder system.

I guess now it is a matter of finding out which trigger, or group of triggers, is causing the path finder to break. Try disabling them in batches until you get it working again. When it does work, the problematic trigger would be in the last batch you disabled. A finer search can then be performed disabling the triggers a few at a time until the problem one is tracked down.

It is also possible that the path finder deaerates due to a systematic fault with multiple triggers in which case there may be no sudden fix with a batch but instead gradual improvement. In such a case looking at what the triggers do might help shed light on the cause.
 
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Please mark this thread as solved. For anyone who ever encounters this nightmare of a problem, I have a possible solution for you.

As I said this is a very old map that was started long before we had advanced knowledge of the world editor and warcraft 3 in general. We had 50 triggers using the event:

  • Unit - A unit enters (Playable map area)
It was never used anywhere else in the map, and it was the only way we knew at the time to accomplish a certain goal. For anyone curious, I disabled half of them (they are 25 per faction) and was not sold on the idea that only one of the last 25 was causing the issue. Disabling the first 25 and re-enabling the last half worked too. Then I realized an otherwise very simple series of five-line triggers were the only ones in the entire map using this event with playable map area like that.

Don't make the same mistake. =)

-§hy
 
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Mind giving us a general sense for what these triggers were doing or an example of what a problem one looked like? If someone decides to explore this further, it would help them if they had an easy way to recreate the problem. And while it could be the event on its own, it could also be a combination of event among other things.
 
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Oh ok, well first of all they were very simple. It was a bad way of determining when a dummy unit was sold by a tavern. The actions were just, if dummy unit is this dummy, then move that player's hero selector to a hero region, remove the dummy from game, etc.. Fifty times for all the heroes. Like I said nothing interesting really. I could grab one for you tomorrow (extremely tired). I've never used that event in the history of my mods, my brother wrote them back in '05 or so.
 
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