Understanding Pathing
 

I have begun what is indeed going to be a very long project. I am going to start from the first expansion and create path files for any zones that do not have one, and some that are corrupt like qeynos2.path. My biggest hold up right now is having a firm grasp of pathing. In some ways it is working as intended and others it does not seem to fit with the documentation. Reading on path threads I remember someone saying that if the mob has a visual line of site to the player it will take it and ignore and paths. This does not seem to be true and can easily be exploitable by players. A few troublesome spots are highly exploitable, one I noticed as a player myself was in front of the entrance to Blackburrow. You can aggro a mob and drag it to the spot on this map. If the mob is were you see it notated and you are standing anywhere as far back as I am on the map, you can move north or south just a small amount and make the mob bounce all the way back to the entrance, and just repeat. The red circles are where someone has already placed path nodes.

So to explain a bit better, the mob is at the entrance and has aggro on you. The mob paths toward you because it has visual line of site. You move up just maybe 20 to 40 points north. The mob will then turn back toward the path node. The mob goes to the path node and then when it reaches it comes back to you. When the mob gets very close to you then go 40 points south and the mob will path back toward the entrance. There are many outside zones I have already noticed this on. I had a new player report this morning he saw the same thing in Field of Bone.

http://www.chroniclesofnorrath.com/J...hing_issue.jpg

Any explanation would be very beneficial. Before I put a large amount of time toward this effort I need a clearer understanding so I am not having to go back and duplicate my own efforts.

I think the agro issue is controlled by the rule 'Pathing:Aggro' which is set to true by default.

But if that is not enabled would the mobs not always path straight to you? Meaning that on zones that do have path files, they would ignore all path nodes and go straight to you? I did not even consider there may be some rules out there. I can play with those rules to try to tweak the pathing. I am not sure there is a rule to fix this though. One interesting rule I see right now is Pathing:MinDistanceForLOSCheckLong

Yeah, there are a load of rules that manage pathing. And most of thoue seem to involve LOS in some way.

There are also a few rules under Maps you may want to look at, and 'Combat:EnableFearPathing' which I am not sure has not been superseded by 'Pathing:Fear'.

I'd start with the path files from takproject, most if not all the classic zones are done

Also, back in the day there was no pathing in outdoor zones so people usually don't bother with them on emu

Have any idea where they store these? Doing a search I could not find and svn or git for them.

I pulled those and other than a few, they are exactly from the source here. But that is better than nothing. These are the ones that I see they have done that are different.

kedge
neriakb
neriakc
powater
solrotower

Pathing nodes are ignored when we have visual sight to player, and no hazards in between.