navithmastero
Level: Smitemaster

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It may sound scary, but it would be nice to be able to select Brained pathfinding as a movement imperative for scripted characters. I'm a little surprised this isn't already a thing to be honest.

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superluminal
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 75
Registered: 05-26-2016
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Is Imperative: Pathfinding not what you're looking for? Just pair it up with Move to Player and you have a character that follows you around as if it was brained.

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spacelike

navithmastero
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Imperative: pathfinding is what stalwarts use, it's not the same as the Brained pathfinding.

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superluminal
Level: Delver
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File: Pathfinding.hold (1021 bytes)
Downloaded 37 times.
License: Public Domain

Not true. Attached is a hold proving that stalwart movement operates differently from brained movement, while brained movement and Imperative Pathfinding movement are identical.

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spacelike

Nuntar
Level: Smitemaster

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And that's just not true either. The most noticeable difference is that brained movement has a list of what it considers "brain-invisible obstacles", which are treated as open floor spaces, and "brain-visible obstacles", which are treated as walls. (Monsters are brain-invisible, because in general, they may have moved by the time the path-following monster reaches them. Force arrows are brain-visible because handling them correctly would complicate things too much.) Imperative Pathfinding considers only what tiles the pathfinding NPC can actually step on, so it goes around monsters, paths across force arrows, etc.

As a corollary, brained monsters have a complex set of rules for what to do if the brain instructs them to make a move they can't actually make. This situation never arises with Imperative Pathfinding.

Other differences can be noticed. If a brained monster can't reach its target, it will move like an unbrained monster. An NPC with Imperative Pathfinding can actually path around obstacles to bring it closer to its target, even if it can't reach it. (An NPC with Imperative Pathfinding (open only) will stay put in that situation -- it won't even make a beelining move towards its target.)

Imperative Pathfinding isn't identical to stalwart movement either. The most noticeable difference there is that a stalwart will path to the closest monster in terms of number of steps, whereas Imperative Pathfinding followed by "Move to Monster" will seek out the nearest monster in absolute distance.

* * *

Getting back the original FR, there is the issue that the brain pathmap targets the player only, whereas "Imperative Brained Pathfinding" could be followed by "Move to" with any target. So it would be better as a command: "Move brained", with "Single step" as an option. Also, it could be used as a condition, so the scripter could check whether a brained move is open, and decide how the NPC should behave if not.

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50th Skywatcher