Yeah, that's kind of the problem I alluded to, isn't it?
But you're right, I don't know the state-of-the-art in pathfinding...as I admitted, the most recent RTS I played was Warcraft 3. It just seems to me to be a very common complaint in most modern games. I still play Team Fortress 2, and even though they've implemented AI, the AI only works on certain pre-designed levels. Yes, I know that a FPS is generally more path-computational than a RTS, but if you're proposing that an RTS have 3D terrain then, well, that makes it a 3D game, no?
And it's been awhile since I've designed a game but I think you're underestimating the computational power it would take for an AI to dynamically generate efficient paths with every change to the terrain. IIRC, a lot of early AI compensated by having pre-calculated paths for each level (and I think virtually all of them only pretended to be encumbered by a fog of war).
My point still stands though...these aren't really innovations...again, I'm not in game development, but I'm guessing that some of these are ideas that teams consider and then drop in lieu of their difficulty of implementation. In other words, the innovation would be the actual implementation of the idea, not the idea itself.
Using a tile or node based A* map, there's no additional cost for altering heuristics on the fly. All paths are always dynamically generated on the fly.
The only reason early AI had 'pre-calculated paths' (an assertion I am dubious about, to be honest) would be that it was running on processors that could barely push the graphics of the time to begin with.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem I alluded to, isn't it?
But you're right, I don't know the state-of-the-art in pathfinding...as I admitted, the most recent RTS I played was Warcraft 3. It just seems to me to be a very common complaint in most modern games. I still play Team Fortress 2, and even though they've implemented AI, the AI only works on certain pre-designed levels. Yes, I know that a FPS is generally more path-computational than a RTS, but if you're proposing that an RTS have 3D terrain then, well, that makes it a 3D game, no?
And it's been awhile since I've designed a game but I think you're underestimating the computational power it would take for an AI to dynamically generate efficient paths with every change to the terrain. IIRC, a lot of early AI compensated by having pre-calculated paths for each level (and I think virtually all of them only pretended to be encumbered by a fog of war).
My point still stands though...these aren't really innovations...again, I'm not in game development, but I'm guessing that some of these are ideas that teams consider and then drop in lieu of their difficulty of implementation. In other words, the innovation would be the actual implementation of the idea, not the idea itself.