I think one big contributing factor for the 'memes' that you did not touched in the video is that both Dragoon and Goliath are big High range !Anti air! units. And a lots of times, the movement 'jankyness' happens when they lock-on on a flyer from out of range and they try to move in, but the flyer escapes. Its especially apparent when there's not a possible way to go closer because of cliff (or its just too far maybe, i don't remember exactly) they just start to dance around the edge. Its just a really specific scenario for Dragoons and Goliaths, as all other units are either the same size but can't hit air(tanks, ultra, etc.) , or just simply smaller or even have shorter range (Marine, Hydra, etc?).
That might be the case, though I often see Dragoons brought up in cases like 6:50 too! But units that chase unreachable enemies can get pretty crazy, I think I recorded an example where a Dragoon would try to fit between a tree and a wall, fail, and walk a whole screen away - but I didn't end up using it in the video because honestly it was pretty hard to explain it lmao
I'm invested into the League of Legends technical background and let me tell you, whenever there are parts of a (competitive) game that don't have publically known information on them, myths and theories go WILD. Worse off, once a myth is created, it becomes the "publically known information" about that aspect of the game, thereby perpetuating it. In my experience, the way to deal with these myths is to give the correct information and attach evidence thereof, ideally visual proof (because that captures the attention of people the best), just like you've done in your video! In any future discussion about this topic your video has a good chance to get linked and should quickly dominate the known facts. Also there is no shortage of myths that mystify aspects of software engineering itself ("this game should switch to a newer game engine that'll fix its bugs"), so showing pathfinding regions and (older) variants of handling location and movement of objects here certainly combats those things as well. Thank you for the great and condensed video about the topic!
Man are you THE Caenen? Crazy to see you here! And yeah I understand that; I would even say these myths form not only around niche interactions, but around normal playable content too. For example, the way the League community talks about Yuumi is pretty weird - it's like most people aren't actually sure what the Champion does or how to try to punish her, but instead they are so committed to hating what she represents, they don't want to bother considering it as a part of the game. Like she's a myth that collects everything the playerbase hates about her, but simultaneously if you ask any particular person they are pretty unlikely to know what kind of lane is good or bad into her. Maybe a bit of a stretch, I'm finding it a bit difficult to formulate my thought; but hopefully it at least kind of makes sense! One last thing, I worked in QA for several years and a form of the thing you describe 200% happens in every QA dept as well. Be it devs or fellow testers, it's so common for people to assume something works one way or another if it's not documented, and then let it through multiple milestones because no-one wants to investigate it more thoroughly
You mean that everything isn't 'literally coded as minions'. :D Coding concepts don't always quite translate well and how easy it is to fix things without recreating everything and potentially breaking more has very little understanding.
didn't touch upon the first culprit in all of this: Starcraft uses Warcraft 2 altered engine and as such is a 2D top-down game, with the isometric tiles being a compromise over this otherwise just "square" game. Therefore all the ramps have actually ragged edges...
I think another part of the dragoon reputation comes from it being a core army unit built in mass with zealot that is supposed to be constantly moving across the map. The Tank's pathfinding is similar but you don't build quite as many of them in the same army and you tend to stop to siege them. So it's not nearly as noticeable as the big dragoon army
As one infinitely interested in AI especially in video games, This was fascinating! I'd love to hear any other tidbits like this that you've learned from your modding experience!
I'd love to see more overview videos like this just in general. Any technical topic related to the game you can think of, I'd watch it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. There's a super old video of a guy playing around with the developer commands on an original Starcraft Beta, and when he turned on the ability to see unit pathfinding nodes I was glued to the screen. It seems boring on the surface, but even after decades of this game's popularity most people still don't know anything about its inner workings.
I think if I will cover something more, another pet peeve of mine is all the "randomness" in SC. There is a lot of it hidden in plain sight; units react with random 1 frame delay, attacks get -1 to +2 frames random cd, certain units round cooldowns to 8 which makes Ensnare ineffective against them, and so on... But it kind of feels like random trivia!
@@iwanabana It happens when a units' state is "Moving" but it tries to play a different animation, it's not a very exciting/easy to show explanation unfortunately; most often you'll see it when a ground unit chases a retreating Air unit without micro
Dude, I've probably believed that dragoon story of changing collision sizes for at least 17 years now. Hell, I just mentioned it the other day in response to another video and feel like this was personally directed towards me and that comment I left.
Can you analise other quirks of the game? Like Scarab and Medic pathfinding, or how when chasing air units, Scourge glitch out and take sudden sharp turns?
I could do a video on Scarabs, but it wouldn't be very long; their weirdness comes from how they have a hard cap of how many regions they can travel. Because pathfinding regions can get really tiny around doodads and in narrow passages, this often means that a ramp or an unfortunate tree will reduce the effective range of a Scarab to be about half of what you'd expect.
@@UEDAIP can't that work other way around as well that being the scarabs having higher range than you'd expect? like when trying to get away from it or something if that makes sense
@@somedude4087 Not exactly, the travel range of the scarab is different to the attack range of the Reaver. Reavers will only attack if the scarab is within x pathfinding regions as well as within x pixel range, but the scarabs will follow until they either get in melee range of their target to trigger explosion or they time out. If the scarab doesn't touch pixel to pixel the target, then it won't explode, which is why pros make their SCVs drill from one mineral line to another when scarabs come, because the SCVs which have no collision to eachother, still have collision to other units, preventing the Scarab from reaching it's target if it's coming from the same direction.
scourge are relatively simple to explain, they try to lead their target a little, to catch them slightly more efficiently, so they can catch units with identical move speed if the fleeing units arent moving in a straight line. But for optimisation(?) they only update this every few frames, idk the delay but its reasonably short but does have a window. Since they only check the position they need to lead the target intermittently, if the enemy unit sharply changes direction after the scourge has locked in its direction for the next few frames, it can look like the scourge has totally goofed off, but from the scourges perspective it could only 'see' the unit in that 1 frame window, and in that 1 frame the unit was moving sharply in a different direction.
@@empty5013 To add on to this comment, this is well documented among zerg players. Pro players use this in ZvZ, and day9 actually has a video explaining and how to abuse this. If there is a scourge chasing your unit, you can actually do a 360 and trick the scourge into thinking you're going behind it, causing the scourge to do an 180 and fly the opposite direction of you.
Havent watched the video yet, but I can say that most units in the game are the size of a Dragoon. The only unit that is bigger is Ultralisk (excluding spells, air units and buildings). Honestly did not expect Siege tanks to be this big, and probes to be so short. SCMdraft 2 lied to me. Oh man, So broodlings are not the only ones that move in bursts. This is mind blowing. Make more educational videos. This is awesome.
1:53 from my own experience of playing the game, they actually do all control about the same. but units like Dragoons and Goliaths need to move a lot more often and you make a lot more of them when you do make them, which is why people are more familiar with these particular units controlling badly. Siege Tanks do not move very often, most of the time they are in siege mode or you only have 1 or 2 of them you're microing at a time. Ultralisks, you dont typically build 30+ of them at one time and try to move all of them together with the rest of an army. Reavers on the other hand have the same deal as Ultralisks, you dont normally make a lot of them, but they are also very, very slow, which gives the illusion of their pathfinding messing up less often, because they are so slow they have a lot more time to compensate and correct their pathfinding on their own before making big mistakes. that's all my own theorizing, before i finish watching this video :)
If I had to make a guess (an uneducated one, I know basically nothing on the subject besides having played those games), it's that they don't try to bypass units. If you order a blob into a chokepoint, you'll never see a unit try to find another route in SC2. They'll still slam into that chokepoint and the units in front of them as long as a building doesn't block it. They might try to move from side to side along the obstacle, but that's it. You don't see them back off and try to move through another ramp or try from another direction and such. In a sense by making it dumber they made it more controlable.
I assume the pathfinding zones also don't exist in sc2, and it just uses a* on the grid. The zones are probably an optimisation that is no longer needed because computers are faster now (something like a 2 pass algorithm where zones are used as a low res first pass, and then the 2nd pass only looks inside those zones)
Part of it probably not using a square grid on an isometric map, units can walk in any direction to get out of the way, no longer only constrained to 8 directions (Edit: 32 actually). 2nd is units do automatically ins SC2 what must be done manually in BW, SC2 units never stop trying to force their way down a choke point. BW players have to spam click to stop the confused walking script from trying to unjam the choke and run away. If you spam click dragoons down a ramp, they won't take that long from getting down, but that forces you to stare at them instead of doing anything else.
Part of what's going on is that the travel speeds of units is constant; they do not fluctuate throughout their walk cycles so even if the units in a formation are out of sync their formations remain very tight. Additionally unlike SC1, ground units in SC2 don't have any noticeable acceleration curve. Contrast the SC1 Vulture with the SC2 Hellion. When you give a move order to a SC1 vulture that is sitting still, it starts very slow and quickly ramps up to top speed, a SC2 hellion instantly goes at top speed.
Very informative, it is really interesting to see how much those left facing stairs mess with things. To think such a slight size adjustment resolves the issue.
lol what is this! Mr N now has youtube channel !!! Best wishes to you and your community as always Mr N.! You know we're here since years cheering for your awesome SC content. 🙂💪
The biggest issue with Goliath pathing is in combat. The goliaths in the front start attacking at maximum range, and the goliaths in the back just run into each other for days while trying and failing to get into attack range.
Well, that's the case with all ranged units in SC - no push priority means that ranged units will get stuck on eachother (though they still sort of do in SC2, where you do have push prio)
@@UEDAIP Yes, but Goliaths suffer from this more than most units. They combine a large collision size, a cheaper cost than other large units like Tanks so you can amass more of them, and less attack range than tanks. Goliaths and Dragoons are the units that struggle most in this situation, which is where the Goliath's bad pathing fame comes from.
Fun fact: stasised units exhibit the random dispersion when overlapping. Easy to observe by using stasis on a large group of probes mining from an assimilator then destroying the assimilator.
Great video!! Starcraft was one of my all time favorite games growing up. I have vivid memories playing online with people. There were so many mods back in the day!! I don't think i'd be the same gamer without Starcraft. thank you for your work in the community!
I kinda figured out that units moved 8 directions and move a certain amount of pixels before either changing directions or redoing a movement cycle(or whatever the more professional or technical term is). It's kinda similar to the enemies Doom 1993 now that I think about it.
I misremembered a little, but it's actually even worse - it's 17 directions drawn only as right-facing sprites, and then the remaining ones are automatically generated as a mirror image. If front- and back-facing units aren't flipped, this would mean there are 32 facing directions (15 + 15 flipped + front + back)
@@theunidentifiedchangeling9451 There are 256 facing/movement angles in Starcraft. Units only appear to move in 8 directions when following long paths, but that's due to the way the game generates a unit's path segments in flat open ground and is not a limitation with unit movement itself. The 17 directions thing is only the number of animation frames in a graphic's frameset if the graphic is set up to be a "turning" graphic, where the frame number is (angle + 4) / 8, and the walking/firing/etc animations are played in steps of 17. If the result for the frame number (rounded down) is higher than 16, it's subtracted from 32 and that frame is mirrored to produce the left-facing animation frames. Think of a 32-pointed star without the 15 points on the left.
I feel like I've even seen a video showing how the hitboxes of Dragoons change when walking... now it feels almost crazy to think that it's not actually the case!
I definitely remember seeing this, my best guess is the visualisation was overlaid on top with editing software. I guess people will just tell lies on the internet.
So that explains so much about the pathfinding memes... I haven't played Starcraft in a long time. I think back then I just accepted that Dragoons couldn't go up stairs no matter how hard one tried.
Check out my new StarCraft In-Depth video here - th-cam.com/video/YRLoLqSodxc/w-d-xo.html Is there anything else that you would like to know about StarCraft? Let me know! Check out my on-going UEDAIP playthrough - th-cam.com/play/PLxptYcFIUohf0mHY7fDesP7d5QLCvfznd.html
I would love to see a dive into worker pathing when mining. What makes certain patches/gas locations more optimal, tricks players can use to optimize economy, etc
@@kamilwiesak2404 Don't know the concrete reason, you might have some luck asking Subsourian on Jayborino's discord (he collects various old SC media). I would guess that since StarCraft's story was made up based on cinematics that were made before the story proper, there was a moment where someone interpreted a cine that would work with Tassadar and Zeratul merging but it was later decided that it doesn't cut it.
@@MrTheQuestioner Even though there is some know-how on how to make workers mine better, it at moments comes down to things that is completely out of control of the player, such as how pfinding regions are arranged (pathfinding regions are the figures divided by red lines you see at 4:37 and in various moments throughout the video), or how do default resource area arrays generate. You would have to re-do maps to fix most of the issues you'd stumble into when mining
Is it possible to apply these changes - e.g. making dragoon collision size 1 pixel less - to Remastered version? I.e. say I want to play SC1 Remastered with a bit less derpiness, how hard is it to change these values?
I've never seen a proper explanation of StarCraft's pathfinding system. I had no idea there was a hidden navmesh divided into regions thst the game uses. You touch upon some aspects of the pathfinding system in this video but I'd love to see a more in depth video explaining the system, including regions, formations, ramps, flyers, and buildings.
Thanks for making this and the one about reavers!! Your deep understanding of the game engine code is like shining a light into the StarCraft x files that have mystified and entertained for decades 😂
I always had a suspicion the movement speed changing might be related, though I had bought in to the resizing hitbox meme so I won't act like I knew all along. I noticed long ago that broodlings despite being one of the fastest units with a small hitbox are complete nightmares to control (mostly from playing weird ums maps), it didnt make sense because zerglings are so good to control. The broodlings sporadic movement was the obvious culprit, and realising the broodlings have weird sporadic movement, the engine must support that in some way, and likely thats why ultras and dragoons move in a slightly erratic way, and knowing what I know about pathfinding from being a game dev I kinda figured units moving at wildly different speeds with hard collisions is probably gonna cause issues. I think the goliath hate is definitely a meme, I've played brood war for decades and I never felt goliaths handled particularly badly and I've only heard the complaints in recent years. Though their hitbox is deceptively big for their sprite, so perhaps thats what bothers people, either way I never felt like they were derpy in the same way that goons and ultras are.
Yep, Broodlings actually stop for several frames at a time! Reavers move in a similar manner as well, though their top movespeed is lower so it may not be as jarring
Great video Nekron, I always felt like StarCraft 1's pathfinding was a bit frustrating, but also quite satisfying and better in some ways for a competitive game compared to StarCraft 2.
Dragoons sometimes bug out and refuse to attack too. I seen a lot of dragoons just open their cannon covers and then just get stuck in that animation. At least siege tanks and Goliaths don't have that issue.
Will you consider doing a video on pathfinding regions? It seems like a lot of the most infamous problems with Starcraft ai like pathfinding and scarabs are actually just attributable to them. What is the necessity of pathfinding regions? How do units interact with them? How are they placed and constructed on competitive maps?
The biggest tl;dr of why were they necessary is that they're an optimization of sorts -- many calculations can fall back to comparing distance as measured in regions, paths can go through region centers etc, instead of having more dynamic/complex tile-based calculations. I think if you were making SC1 with modern machines in mind, you could get way more granular and just bite the bullet on performance costs (which today would likely be trivial in a 2D game) But they ended up being a cool thing that was reused for the AI a lot, and that part I don't think would be a good idea to replace wholesale even if the pathfinding system was adjusted. Pathfinding itself is also untouchable for large parts of whatever playerbase SC has left, in any case. I did touch a bit on how units interact with them I feel, and it's kind of hard to get into it anymore than I did in the video (though I'm sure I could've made things more explicit/elaborate if I could re-do parts of this) They are calculated automatically based on an obnoxiously complicated algorithm that I can't really wrap my head around well enough to explain it
You didn't touch upon the first culprit in all of this: Starcraft uses Warcraft 2 altered engine and as such is a 2D top-down game, with the isometric tiles being a compromise over this otherwise just "square" game. Therefore all the ramps have actually ragged edges...
more in depth of what pathfinding zones are for would be interesting. I still don't understand what is really going on in the move command. Are they told to move along the cliff to move out of the way of the other units going down the ramp...?
The game generates them as terrain is made. The edges between other WALKABLE areas are usually quite straight and boxy, while edges between walkable and non-walkable areas get really funky because they accurately conform to the edges of whatever doodad or terrain they're bordering. So around the ramps they're quite jagged because the actual walkable edge of the terrain is quite jagged.
I just feel some of this little issues Blizzard kind of solve it with WC3 and mastered them on SC2. Still the Carbot animation which the mock SC1 dragoon and goliath makes me laugh a lot.
You can browse through project files at github.com/BoneHorror/UEDAIP-Source, it's hard for me to precisely say what is possible because at this point I've done pretty much everything I've wanted to over the years
How did you achieve rendering of the regions and waypoints @ 3:40 ? The regions could be (kind of annoyingly) reconstructed via BWAPI but my best guess for the pathfinding waypoints is that either you reproduced the logic from OpenBW or you're drawing them via modifying BWAPI itself to exposem.
@@hyunwhanjoe3477 In SC 1.16 you add plugins via a thing called Firegraft, it's really old now and kind of hard to get (also Windows defender thinks it's a virus)
@@fulguratingbean9489 It basically segments the map into smaller regions so that there's less calculations going on to make a unit get from one side of the map to the other. They just have to move from box to box rather than having to actively work out what way to go all the time. When you create a map, it automatically draws a pathfinding region based on what the terrain looks like.
There was a worry that if the remastered team broke things in the game, that Blizzard wouldn't keep maintaining it to fix it again and that it might never be right again. So they'd rather have a mostly working game that has some mostly acceptable issues, than one that could be broken worse that might be left untouched and broken if Blizzard ever did abandon it. And judging by the state of the ladder and the lack of originally promised features, it may have been a good thing...
@@Nobody-tm9vr You might be able to get some improvement by just shrinking their sizes and having all units have smooth movement without causing major bugs, though the jams around ramps may require more work. However, "all the units going where you want them to," at this stage of the game, would technically be a buff. From the start some units were designed slightly stronger to compensate for the amount of babying they need to move around when nearing max supply. Players would effectively have to spend less effort into just getting them out of their base, and into a crucial fight.
@@Appletank8 I wasn't asking about all the units, only Dragoon and the Goliath since those two units are infamous for being too messy. Well yes, the whole of SC1 revolves around fighting against the clunkiness of the game but it would be good for Dragoons and Goliaths to be more in line with the other units in terms of management.
@@Nobody-tm9vr I mean, yes, that is still implicitly a buff to Dragoons. They get into position to fire a lot faster and easier, ergo doing more damage overall.
Back 90s when star craft came out the technology to make a unit shrink like that to go up stairs was not available. I would like to know how people got that idea
not really, unit scaling during different animations was used in the 80's on the NES, it just wasn't applied to RTS at the time. hell, the morph ball and super mushrooms are literally gameplay loops designed around the concept.
How did you create more than 70 campaign missions? If you add all missions from starcraft 1 + bloodwar, it wouldn't even reach 60 campaign missions in total.
When asked, players requested no gameplay changes because they weren’t sure Blizzard wouldn’t accidentally break something and never get around to fixing it.
UEDAIP tweaks pathfinding a bit (only within what's possible with data changes), but it also changes balance and a lot of other stuff! Would you like a mod that only tweaks pathfinding and maybe some minor QOL things? Was wondering about a "light" version of my mod, but not sure if there'd be interest in it
Man... there is something about this video that makes it really hard to understand for me. I'm not sure if it's the accent, the audio quality, or a combination of those but I just struggled a lot with clearly understanding what he was saying.
I think one big contributing factor for the 'memes' that you did not touched in the video is that both Dragoon and Goliath are big High range !Anti air! units. And a lots of times, the movement 'jankyness' happens when they lock-on on a flyer from out of range and they try to move in, but the flyer escapes. Its especially apparent when there's not a possible way to go closer because of cliff (or its just too far maybe, i don't remember exactly) they just start to dance around the edge. Its just a really specific scenario for Dragoons and Goliaths, as all other units are either the same size but can't hit air(tanks, ultra, etc.) , or just simply smaller or even have shorter range (Marine, Hydra, etc?).
That might be the case, though I often see Dragoons brought up in cases like 6:50 too! But units that chase unreachable enemies can get pretty crazy, I think I recorded an example where a Dragoon would try to fit between a tree and a wall, fail, and walk a whole screen away - but I didn't end up using it in the video because honestly it was pretty hard to explain it lmao
no, he knows about all things BW
Moving dragoon's up and down stairs feels like pushing a square through a tunnel with zero tolerance.
it literally is that, squeezing a 32x32 units though a 32 zigzag pixel space
Cerebrate, take these the deadliest of my ultralisks. They shall aid you in your search...
Amusing...
Daggoth, these Ultralisks can't get down these stairs!
@@stylesrjnow I'm just imagining uktralisks trying to get down stairs like a small dog trying to jump off a couch.
Where did you learn walking up and down stair, boys.
@@SoloNit there's a research upgrade for that in the evolution chamber I think😆
I'm invested into the League of Legends technical background and let me tell you, whenever there are parts of a (competitive) game that don't have publically known information on them, myths and theories go WILD. Worse off, once a myth is created, it becomes the "publically known information" about that aspect of the game, thereby perpetuating it. In my experience, the way to deal with these myths is to give the correct information and attach evidence thereof, ideally visual proof (because that captures the attention of people the best), just like you've done in your video! In any future discussion about this topic your video has a good chance to get linked and should quickly dominate the known facts.
Also there is no shortage of myths that mystify aspects of software engineering itself ("this game should switch to a newer game engine that'll fix its bugs"), so showing pathfinding regions and (older) variants of handling location and movement of objects here certainly combats those things as well. Thank you for the great and condensed video about the topic!
Man are you THE Caenen? Crazy to see you here!
And yeah I understand that; I would even say these myths form not only around niche interactions, but around normal playable content too. For example, the way the League community talks about Yuumi is pretty weird - it's like most people aren't actually sure what the Champion does or how to try to punish her, but instead they are so committed to hating what she represents, they don't want to bother considering it as a part of the game. Like she's a myth that collects everything the playerbase hates about her, but simultaneously if you ask any particular person they are pretty unlikely to know what kind of lane is good or bad into her.
Maybe a bit of a stretch, I'm finding it a bit difficult to formulate my thought; but hopefully it at least kind of makes sense!
One last thing, I worked in QA for several years and a form of the thing you describe 200% happens in every QA dept as well. Be it devs or fellow testers, it's so common for people to assume something works one way or another if it's not documented, and then let it through multiple milestones because no-one wants to investigate it more thoroughly
You mean that everything isn't 'literally coded as minions'. :D Coding concepts don't always quite translate well and how easy it is to fix things without recreating everything and potentially breaking more has very little understanding.
didn't touch upon the first culprit in all of this: Starcraft uses Warcraft 2 altered engine and as such is a 2D top-down game, with the isometric tiles being a compromise over this otherwise just "square" game. Therefore all the ramps have actually ragged edges...
I think another part of the dragoon reputation comes from it being a core army unit built in mass with zealot that is supposed to be constantly moving across the map. The Tank's pathfinding is similar but you don't build quite as many of them in the same army and you tend to stop to siege them. So it's not nearly as noticeable as the big dragoon army
I found this video interesting and am letting you know in the comments!
I am engaging with your comment so that the algorithm will promote this video.
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I am commenting under your comment to make everyone happy.
Good ol High Templars doing the Archon Square Dance.
I grew up with starcraft1 with my father, I’m always happy to see that a game so old is still getting content, thank you for making me smile :)
As one infinitely interested in AI especially in video games, This was fascinating! I'd love to hear any other tidbits like this that you've learned from your modding experience!
I'd love to see more overview videos like this just in general. Any technical topic related to the game you can think of, I'd watch it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. There's a super old video of a guy playing around with the developer commands on an original Starcraft Beta, and when he turned on the ability to see unit pathfinding nodes I was glued to the screen. It seems boring on the surface, but even after decades of this game's popularity most people still don't know anything about its inner workings.
I think if I will cover something more, another pet peeve of mine is all the "randomness" in SC. There is a lot of it hidden in plain sight; units react with random 1 frame delay, attacks get -1 to +2 frames random cd, certain units round cooldowns to 8 which makes Ensnare ineffective against them, and so on... But it kind of feels like random trivia!
@@UEDAIP Random trivia is good!
@@UEDAIP I would love to see what causes units to seize up and stop firing. like, dragoons.
@@iwanabana It happens when a units' state is "Moving" but it tries to play a different animation, it's not a very exciting/easy to show explanation unfortunately; most often you'll see it when a ground unit chases a retreating Air unit without micro
Dude, I've probably believed that dragoon story of changing collision sizes for at least 17 years now.
Hell, I just mentioned it the other day in response to another video and feel like this was personally directed towards me and that comment I left.
That's fascinating. I always thought the dragoons collision box changed size as they walked to account for their particular derpiness
Can you analise other quirks of the game? Like Scarab and Medic pathfinding, or how when chasing air units, Scourge glitch out and take sudden sharp turns?
I could do a video on Scarabs, but it wouldn't be very long; their weirdness comes from how they have a hard cap of how many regions they can travel. Because pathfinding regions can get really tiny around doodads and in narrow passages, this often means that a ramp or an unfortunate tree will reduce the effective range of a Scarab to be about half of what you'd expect.
@@UEDAIP can't that work other way around as well that being the scarabs having higher range than you'd expect? like when trying to get away from it or something if that makes sense
@@somedude4087 Not exactly, the travel range of the scarab is different to the attack range of the Reaver. Reavers will only attack if the scarab is within x pathfinding regions as well as within x pixel range, but the scarabs will follow until they either get in melee range of their target to trigger explosion or they time out.
If the scarab doesn't touch pixel to pixel the target, then it won't explode, which is why pros make their SCVs drill from one mineral line to another when scarabs come, because the SCVs which have no collision to eachother, still have collision to other units, preventing the Scarab from reaching it's target if it's coming from the same direction.
scourge are relatively simple to explain, they try to lead their target a little, to catch them slightly more efficiently, so they can catch units with identical move speed if the fleeing units arent moving in a straight line. But for optimisation(?) they only update this every few frames, idk the delay but its reasonably short but does have a window.
Since they only check the position they need to lead the target intermittently, if the enemy unit sharply changes direction after the scourge has locked in its direction for the next few frames, it can look like the scourge has totally goofed off, but from the scourges perspective it could only 'see' the unit in that 1 frame window, and in that 1 frame the unit was moving sharply in a different direction.
@@empty5013 To add on to this comment, this is well documented among zerg players. Pro players use this in ZvZ, and day9 actually has a video explaining and how to abuse this. If there is a scourge chasing your unit, you can actually do a 360 and trick the scourge into thinking you're going behind it, causing the scourge to do an 180 and fly the opposite direction of you.
Havent watched the video yet, but I can say that most units in the game are the size of a Dragoon.
The only unit that is bigger is Ultralisk (excluding spells, air units and buildings).
Honestly did not expect Siege tanks to be this big, and probes to be so short.
SCMdraft 2 lied to me.
Oh man, So broodlings are not the only ones that move in bursts. This is mind blowing.
Make more educational videos. This is awesome.
This type of content is very interesting, hope you keep doing more of it and even for SC2.
1:53 from my own experience of playing the game, they actually do all control about the same. but units like Dragoons and Goliaths need to move a lot more often and you make a lot more of them when you do make them, which is why people are more familiar with these particular units controlling badly. Siege Tanks do not move very often, most of the time they are in siege mode or you only have 1 or 2 of them you're microing at a time. Ultralisks, you dont typically build 30+ of them at one time and try to move all of them together with the rest of an army. Reavers on the other hand have the same deal as Ultralisks, you dont normally make a lot of them, but they are also very, very slow, which gives the illusion of their pathfinding messing up less often, because they are so slow they have a lot more time to compensate and correct their pathfinding on their own before making big mistakes. that's all my own theorizing, before i finish watching this video :)
Except when you tell the reaver to shoot a defence from out of range and it says "no problem, point blank range as requested!"
I have been sharing this info ever since you told me a while back. Thanks for a great video for me to refer to!
I've never seen idle zealots doing stuff they do at 8:44.
They seem to use the Terran Marine idle animation "script"/code. That's it.
I also heard that thing about the dragoon changing collider sizes, but this makes more sense. Cool video
fascinasting, answered 25 years of questions in a few minutes, thank you for your work and modding
Executor, take this, the chonkiest of my dragoons and travel up this mountain.
These are phenomenal, please keep producing videos about mechanics like this!
So what makes sc2 path finding soooo good compared to BW? What was the key improvement do you think? Is it that the collision zones are "squishy"?
If I had to make a guess (an uneducated one, I know basically nothing on the subject besides having played those games), it's that they don't try to bypass units. If you order a blob into a chokepoint, you'll never see a unit try to find another route in SC2. They'll still slam into that chokepoint and the units in front of them as long as a building doesn't block it. They might try to move from side to side along the obstacle, but that's it. You don't see them back off and try to move through another ramp or try from another direction and such. In a sense by making it dumber they made it more controlable.
I assume the pathfinding zones also don't exist in sc2, and it just uses a* on the grid. The zones are probably an optimisation that is no longer needed because computers are faster now (something like a 2 pass algorithm where zones are used as a low res first pass, and then the 2nd pass only looks inside those zones)
Part of it probably not using a square grid on an isometric map, units can walk in any direction to get out of the way, no longer only constrained to 8 directions (Edit: 32 actually).
2nd is units do automatically ins SC2 what must be done manually in BW, SC2 units never stop trying to force their way down a choke point. BW players have to spam click to stop the confused walking script from trying to unjam the choke and run away. If you spam click dragoons down a ramp, they won't take that long from getting down, but that forces you to stare at them instead of doing anything else.
Part of what's going on is that the travel speeds of units is constant; they do not fluctuate throughout their walk cycles so even if the units in a formation are out of sync their formations remain very tight.
Additionally unlike SC1, ground units in SC2 don't have any noticeable acceleration curve.
Contrast the SC1 Vulture with the SC2 Hellion. When you give a move order to a SC1 vulture that is sitting still, it starts very slow and quickly ramps up to top speed, a SC2 hellion instantly goes at top speed.
in this case it seems to be that units can push other units out of the way in sc2, ie. 'push priority' but could be wrong.
Truly amazing video. Pathfinding regions blow my mind. I can't even imagine the process by which those must get baked by the map editor.
Very informative, it is really interesting to see how much those left facing stairs mess with things. To think such a slight size adjustment resolves the issue.
I will never forget that clip of a Dragoon quantum tunneling over a bunch of terrain
lol what is this! Mr N now has youtube channel !!! Best wishes to you and your community as always Mr N.!
You know we're here since years cheering for your awesome SC content. 🙂💪
Thank you Danny, all the best to you too
The biggest issue with Goliath pathing is in combat. The goliaths in the front start attacking at maximum range, and the goliaths in the back just run into each other for days while trying and failing to get into attack range.
Well, that's the case with all ranged units in SC - no push priority means that ranged units will get stuck on eachother (though they still sort of do in SC2, where you do have push prio)
@@UEDAIP Yes, but Goliaths suffer from this more than most units. They combine a large collision size, a cheaper cost than other large units like Tanks so you can amass more of them, and less attack range than tanks. Goliaths and Dragoons are the units that struggle most in this situation, which is where the Goliath's bad pathing fame comes from.
Fun fact: stasised units exhibit the random dispersion when overlapping. Easy to observe by using stasis on a large group of probes mining from an assimilator then destroying the assimilator.
Great video!! Starcraft was one of my all time favorite games growing up. I have vivid memories playing online with people. There were so many mods back in the day!! I don't think i'd be the same gamer without Starcraft. thank you for your work in the community!
I was always interested in this, thanks for this video man
it's almost like each pixel needs stats!
I kinda figured out that units moved 8 directions and move a certain amount of pixels before either changing directions or redoing a movement cycle(or whatever the more professional or technical term is). It's kinda similar to the enemies Doom 1993 now that I think about it.
They actually move in 17 directions in SC! If you want to see a game with only 8 directions, Dark Colony is a good example
@@UEDAIP I understand 8, and 16 is fine too, just double that
but 17?
I misremembered a little, but it's actually even worse - it's 17 directions drawn only as right-facing sprites, and then the remaining ones are automatically generated as a mirror image. If front- and back-facing units aren't flipped, this would mean there are 32 facing directions (15 + 15 flipped + front + back)
@@UEDAIP I am confused, but hey 17 is my favorite number so XD
@@theunidentifiedchangeling9451 There are 256 facing/movement angles in Starcraft. Units only appear to move in 8 directions when following long paths, but that's due to the way the game generates a unit's path segments in flat open ground and is not a limitation with unit movement itself.
The 17 directions thing is only the number of animation frames in a graphic's frameset if the graphic is set up to be a "turning" graphic, where the frame number is (angle + 4) / 8, and the walking/firing/etc animations are played in steps of 17. If the result for the frame number (rounded down) is higher than 16, it's subtracted from 32 and that frame is mirrored to produce the left-facing animation frames. Think of a 32-pointed star without the 15 points on the left.
I feel like I've even seen a video showing how the hitboxes of Dragoons change when walking... now it feels almost crazy to think that it's not actually the case!
I definitely remember seeing this, my best guess is the visualisation was overlaid on top with editing software.
I guess people will just tell lies on the internet.
The high templars at the end were in Spain without the a
seeing them move so smoothly tripped me out ngl
So that explains so much about the pathfinding memes...
I haven't played Starcraft in a long time. I think back then I just accepted that Dragoons couldn't go up stairs no matter how hard one tried.
Check out my new StarCraft In-Depth video here - th-cam.com/video/YRLoLqSodxc/w-d-xo.html
Is there anything else that you would like to know about StarCraft? Let me know!
Check out my on-going UEDAIP playthrough - th-cam.com/play/PLxptYcFIUohf0mHY7fDesP7d5QLCvfznd.html
do you know why archon (tassadar/zeratul) got scrapped?
I would love to see a dive into worker pathing when mining. What makes certain patches/gas locations more optimal, tricks players can use to optimize economy, etc
@@kamilwiesak2404 Don't know the concrete reason, you might have some luck asking Subsourian on Jayborino's discord (he collects various old SC media). I would guess that since StarCraft's story was made up based on cinematics that were made before the story proper, there was a moment where someone interpreted a cine that would work with Tassadar and Zeratul merging but it was later decided that it doesn't cut it.
@@MrTheQuestioner Even though there is some know-how on how to make workers mine better, it at moments comes down to things that is completely out of control of the player, such as how pfinding regions are arranged (pathfinding regions are the figures divided by red lines you see at 4:37 and in various moments throughout the video), or how do default resource area arrays generate. You would have to re-do maps to fix most of the issues you'd stumble into when mining
Is it possible to apply these changes - e.g. making dragoon collision size 1 pixel less - to Remastered version?
I.e. say I want to play SC1 Remastered with a bit less derpiness, how hard is it to change these values?
Finally!! Someone explains this i got tired explaining to friends new to the og starcraft.
u deserve 49x more than u have bro, unique content
69x more
@@petercarioscia9189 and probably also 420x more
@@okayadaskfdnasdfpsdngfpsdjhg 2137x more!!!!
I've never seen a proper explanation of StarCraft's pathfinding system. I had no idea there was a hidden navmesh divided into regions thst the game uses. You touch upon some aspects of the pathfinding system in this video but I'd love to see a more in depth video explaining the system, including regions, formations, ramps, flyers, and buildings.
Thanks for making this and the one about reavers!! Your deep understanding of the game engine code is like shining a light into the StarCraft x files that have mystified and entertained for decades 😂
8:15
THIS FEELS VERY WRONG
I always had a suspicion the movement speed changing might be related, though I had bought in to the resizing hitbox meme so I won't act like I knew all along.
I noticed long ago that broodlings despite being one of the fastest units with a small hitbox are complete nightmares to control (mostly from playing weird ums maps), it didnt make sense because zerglings are so good to control. The broodlings sporadic movement was the obvious culprit, and realising the broodlings have weird sporadic movement, the engine must support that in some way, and likely thats why ultras and dragoons move in a slightly erratic way, and knowing what I know about pathfinding from being a game dev I kinda figured units moving at wildly different speeds with hard collisions is probably gonna cause issues.
I think the goliath hate is definitely a meme, I've played brood war for decades and I never felt goliaths handled particularly badly and I've only heard the complaints in recent years. Though their hitbox is deceptively big for their sprite, so perhaps thats what bothers people, either way I never felt like they were derpy in the same way that goons and ultras are.
Yep, Broodlings actually stop for several frames at a time! Reavers move in a similar manner as well, though their top movespeed is lower so it may not be as jarring
Great video Nekron, I always felt like StarCraft 1's pathfinding was a bit frustrating, but also quite satisfying and better in some ways for a competitive game compared to StarCraft 2.
Wow. So amazingly well made video. Pathfinding is much clearer for me now :)
not really
@@greenwave819 OK, maybe you know better than me, what I used to know and what I know now :/
Really great video, thanks for the content!
Dragoons sometimes bug out and refuse to attack too. I seen a lot of dragoons just open their cannon covers and then just get stuck in that animation. At least siege tanks and Goliaths don't have that issue.
Very interesting video, thanks for clarifying these peculiar interactions!
More in depth videos like this and I'm sure your channel will explode!
Will you consider doing a video on pathfinding regions? It seems like a lot of the most infamous problems with Starcraft ai like pathfinding and scarabs are actually just attributable to them. What is the necessity of pathfinding regions? How do units interact with them? How are they placed and constructed on competitive maps?
The biggest tl;dr of why were they necessary is that they're an optimization of sorts -- many calculations can fall back to comparing distance as measured in regions, paths can go through region centers etc, instead of having more dynamic/complex tile-based calculations. I think if you were making SC1 with modern machines in mind, you could get way more granular and just bite the bullet on performance costs (which today would likely be trivial in a 2D game)
But they ended up being a cool thing that was reused for the AI a lot, and that part I don't think would be a good idea to replace wholesale even if the pathfinding system was adjusted. Pathfinding itself is also untouchable for large parts of whatever playerbase SC has left, in any case.
I did touch a bit on how units interact with them I feel, and it's kind of hard to get into it anymore than I did in the video (though I'm sure I could've made things more explicit/elaborate if I could re-do parts of this)
They are calculated automatically based on an obnoxiously complicated algorithm that I can't really wrap my head around well enough to explain it
You didn't touch upon the first culprit in all of this: Starcraft uses Warcraft 2 altered engine and as such is a 2D top-down game, with the isometric tiles being a compromise over this otherwise just "square" game. Therefore all the ramps have actually ragged edges...
more in depth of what pathfinding zones are for would be interesting.
I still don't understand what is really going on in the move command. Are they told to move along the cliff to move out of the way of the other units going down the ramp...?
That was interesting to watch!
Visual demonstration was on point!
Thanks!
great work, interesting
24 years too late, but better late than never
This video was really good, thank you bone horror
How are the map regions decided? Some of them looked like they ended up as really funky shapes with a protrusion
it is artistic!
The game generates them as terrain is made. The edges between other WALKABLE areas are usually quite straight and boxy, while edges between walkable and non-walkable areas get really funky because they accurately conform to the edges of whatever doodad or terrain they're bordering. So around the ramps they're quite jagged because the actual walkable edge of the terrain is quite jagged.
it's always intersting how games tick under the hood. thanks
I'd love to see a video of you challenging Startosis!
it took only 24 years but now I know the source of my frustrations :P
I assume the strange movement scripts going up and down is to simulate galloping
3:49 video start
Thank you! Seriously.
I just feel some of this little issues Blizzard kind of solve it with WC3 and mastered them on SC2. Still the Carbot animation which the mock SC1 dragoon and goliath makes me laugh a lot.
how do you get those pathing boxes and lines to show ingame?
You can't normally, it's done using a 1.16 debug plugin
This is essential knowledge.
Thank you very much!
For Dragoons move command is just a suggestion.
I dont even play starcraft but really enjoyed this :) Thanks for the hard work
I want to know what sort of scripts you have done; what is actually possible in SC1 in terms of modding, compared to WC3/SC2.
You can browse through project files at github.com/BoneHorror/UEDAIP-Source, it's hard for me to precisely say what is possible because at this point I've done pretty much everything I've wanted to over the years
Here to show positivity in the comments and compliment your work
Fight Protoganda with Facts! Love it! FOR THE SWARM! FOR THE HIVE! \o/\o/\o/\o/\o/\o/\o/ Starcraft Mythbuster series?
Wow final an explanation!!!
Good video
It's so sad lotv dragoons were fixed...
Didn't Legacy Of The Memes bring it back with a vengeance?
awesome video!
You are a wild man!
How did you achieve rendering of the regions and waypoints @ 3:40 ? The regions could be (kind of annoyingly) reconstructed via BWAPI but my best guess for the pathfinding waypoints is that either you reproduced the logic from OpenBW or you're drawing them via modifying BWAPI itself to exposem.
Via this plugin - github.com/neivv/ai_debug_1161
@@UEDAIP How do you use this plugin?
@@hyunwhanjoe3477 In SC 1.16 you add plugins via a thing called Firegraft, it's really old now and kind of hard to get (also Windows defender thinks it's a virus)
@@UEDAIP With Firegraft do I just add the ai_debug.qdp file into the plugins tab?
@@UEDAIP Do I just add ai_debug.qdp in the plugins tab for Firegraft?
Glory to the pathfinding
I didn't quite understand what pathing regions are exactly
Are you familiar with what navmesh is in Unreal games, by chance? It's basically that, except with a way more convoluted way of separating segments
@@UEDAIP Unfortunately I don't know what that is either, sorry
@@fulguratingbean9489 It basically segments the map into smaller regions so that there's less calculations going on to make a unit get from one side of the map to the other. They just have to move from box to box rather than having to actively work out what way to go all the time. When you create a map, it automatically draws a pathfinding region based on what the terrain looks like.
@@AdamDunebugDunas Ooooh okay, that makes sense. Thank you!
cool stuff bro
SC Remastered team wanted to fix the pathing of Goliath and Dragoon but the community said: "No changes".
There was a worry that if the remastered team broke things in the game, that Blizzard wouldn't keep maintaining it to fix it again and that it might never be right again. So they'd rather have a mostly working game that has some mostly acceptable issues, than one that could be broken worse that might be left untouched and broken if Blizzard ever did abandon it. And judging by the state of the ladder and the lack of originally promised features, it may have been a good thing...
@@AdamDunebugDunas I doubt fixing Goliath and Dragoon would break anything. Those units really needed a fix, they are so buggy.
@@Nobody-tm9vr You might be able to get some improvement by just shrinking their sizes and having all units have smooth movement without causing major bugs, though the jams around ramps may require more work.
However, "all the units going where you want them to," at this stage of the game, would technically be a buff. From the start some units were designed slightly stronger to compensate for the amount of babying they need to move around when nearing max supply. Players would effectively have to spend less effort into just getting them out of their base, and into a crucial fight.
@@Appletank8 I wasn't asking about all the units, only Dragoon and the Goliath since those two units are infamous for being too messy.
Well yes, the whole of SC1 revolves around fighting against the clunkiness of the game but it would be good for Dragoons and Goliaths to be more in line with the other units in terms of management.
@@Nobody-tm9vr I mean, yes, that is still implicitly a buff to Dragoons. They get into position to fire a lot faster and easier, ergo doing more damage overall.
Fantastic work
Back 90s when star craft came out the technology to make a unit shrink like that to go up stairs was not available. I would like to know how people got that idea
not really, unit scaling during different animations was used in the 80's on the NES, it just wasn't applied to RTS at the time.
hell, the morph ball and super mushrooms are literally gameplay loops designed around the concept.
Are you actually saying that it was impossible to change a value in a game coded from the ground up? Come on...
3:48, was starcraft coded in assembly?
Nope, though the scripting languages used by SC do end up resembling ASM a bit. StarCraft was programmed in C++
Don't show this to Artosis, he doesn't like anything that takes away am excuse 😂
How did you create more than 70 campaign missions? If you add all missions from starcraft 1 + bloodwar, it wouldn't even reach 60 campaign missions in total.
I've made some one-offs for mapping contests and missions outside of the main campaign
I have always been wondering is there a complete SCBW source code available?
OpenBW on Github is as close as you can get
Pretty cool
So both the stair and the archon morph problem can be fixed by changing collision size? Why hasnt blizzard fixed it for the remaster? Or have they?
When asked, players requested no gameplay changes because they weren’t sure Blizzard wouldn’t accidentally break something and never get around to fixing it.
@@Appletank8 Looking at what they did to Warcraft, the community made the right call taking a 95% functional game over a 100% broken one.
Amazing
Is there a mod to change pathfinding?
UEDAIP tweaks pathfinding a bit (only within what's possible with data changes), but it also changes balance and a lot of other stuff! Would you like a mod that only tweaks pathfinding and maybe some minor QOL things? Was wondering about a "light" version of my mod, but not sure if there'd be interest in it
what version of SC is the gameplay at the beggingn from?
appears to be unmodded Remastered!
Great video!
I finally understood that stoopid pathfinding
Man... there is something about this video that makes it really hard to understand for me. I'm not sure if it's the accent, the audio quality, or a combination of those but I just struggled a lot with clearly understanding what he was saying.
I actually got it up there you've just gotta try more
Good video imo
For the algorithm
Hi Neko!
Now that you've figured it out can we fix it? :D