There’s nothing more annoying than seeing NPCs that you need to go somewhere run pell-mell into a giant, obvious wall or some other insurmountable structure that draws them in like a tractor beam made for dumb robots. The primary cause of such digital goofiness is pathfinding, and that’s one of the big tech updates that Camelot Unchained is offering up in their weekly update.
Making sure NPCs don’t do stupid things seems like it should be routine, but considering that one of the game’s control point scenarios depends on NPCs being in the right place at the right time, we’d say it’s pretty important the team gets this right. Specifically, the latest update to NPC pathfinding sees characters able to navigate in a 3-D space, which means they should be able to handle ramparts and stairs. The pathfinding system has also seen tweaks to better detect a variety of obstacles of various heights.
Of course, making sure NPCs aren’t as static as rocks wasn’t the only thing Camelot Unchained worked on. A number of progress reports are part of the weekly dev blog as usual, including word on how the “Linuxification” of the servers is going, new procedural generation for materials, and animations for giants and draugur among the updates. You can get the full rundown or check out the end-of-week wrap-up video below.
