Heya everyone, Some of you hard-core modders probably know that ToEEWB since v1.7.4 includes a Path Node Generator that will help you create much more "walkable" maps, sort of. Anyway, there is an important concept in the Path Node Generator, namely the 20-tile radius. The name itself is not very self-explanatory, because this radius is actually not a "radius" as such (as far as circles go ), it's more of a diamond-shaped thing and, therefore, it's not always a "20" tile radius at all. Anyway, I thought that the concept is hard enough to explain without a drawing, so I decided to release one of the blueprints for the path node generator that shows what the 20-tile radius is (Note: it was actually used as testing grounds for the early version of a PND generator in our internal pre-v1.7.4 beta of ToEEWB). In the *left* part you can see the diamond-shaped drawing of a twenty-tile radius, together with its most important vertical, horizontal, and diagonal points marked. Also, red "*A", "*B", and "*C" points show the possible path nodes that are said to be within the 20-tile radius. Note: *DO NOT* rely too much on the text comments in the left part, since they are for the most part *outdated* (the blueprint comes from the time when the PND generator was still a concept, so a lot of testing was done to find out the exact radius size that would be fitting). Just look at the drawing, and that's it. In the *right* part you can see an example of path node links being generated between five path nodes, named A,B,C,D, and E. You can pretty much read the text comments there as well, since they explain how the links are generated very well. The only thing that's wrong in the text on the right is the fact that it says "Path nodes (generated)". Of course, path nodes themselves are not generated but placed by the modder manually instead. The links are generated by the PND generator. I hope you find the blueprint helpful. - Agetian
Lemme get this straight: so in the theoretical example, you would have to add some more nodes between d & e, but then could go from a to e comfortably? Have I got that right? Pathways will probably be included pretty late in the game for KotB but I am glad this is here, since sectoring the Keep map (roughly same size as Nulb) the ability to move parties any decent sort of distance across sectors has practically disappeared unless there is LoS.
Yeah, sure. However, if you add some between D&E, C&E, and B&E, that will be even better because pathfinding won't be that "rough" (imagine: when you want to walk from A to E, if you ONLY have a path node between D and E, your character will have to walk in the following way: A->C->D->E which may be weird if you add point F between 'B' and 'E', then the direct path can be found like this: A->B->F->E I hope you're getting what I say. - Agetian
Sure. Ok. lets say we go to an extreme and attach a node to every passable tile, will that have a downside? Eg lag? Or would it be a good idea? And does the pathnode generator allow the editing of existing files in the game? I can think of a few places I would love to fix things up (near Black Jay's house, near the Brewery, Temple lvl 4 near Paida's room...)
*ROTFL* I tried doing that in a very early concept test of a path node generator. The resulting pathnode.pnd file is approximately 80MB long (because of all the links, you know). It seems the game can't even parse it, so ALL tiles become passable (even those that are sectored as impassable). Afterwards, when you click "Quit Game", it takes about ten minutes for the game to shutdown on my P4-2.8ghz/512MB RAM (I think it tried to unload all the nodes and links). At first I thought the game hung, but in fact it didn't. I spoke with Steve and he suggested the above-mentioned ("blueprinted" in the above pic) way of generating path node links. It's also very very close to how things are generated in the official Worlded (from Steve's words). It doesn't lag, and it allows more versatility as to how to generate path nodes on the side of the modder. Also, it results in much more compact (100 bytes - 40KB) path node files. Of course, it can load and parse any pathnode.pnd file. The downside here is that the algorithm of ToEEWB's path node generator is still a bit different from the official one, so some links may become dead for the original path nodes, while other links may be generated... You may want to tweak the tolerance parameter (possibly set it to a more lax value) while dealing with original path node files. Other than that, they are handled perfectly. - Agetian
