Forum rules - please read before posting.
Keep Out of Player's Way
I have 3 chicken NPCs inside a small fenced area (the navmesh is a rectangle with a narrow bottleneck that leads to a larger area). The chickens have "keep out of player's way?" checked, and the minimum distance to keep is 4.
I'd never experienced this before, but now that I have, I can reproduce it consistently: if I approach a chicken near the edge of the navmesh, where it can't feasibly move away from the player without going through the player first, then it will ignore the navmesh altogether and move away outside it.
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Categories
Welcome to the official forum for Adventure Creator.
Comments
Update: the issue isn't just "keep out of player's way", and I figured out the reason.
I noticed that some "Character>Move to point>Pathfind? (Checked)" actions were no longer respecting the navmesh (the character would simply move there in a straight line without pathfinding), but others worked just fine. The difference between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't was that the former's markers were inside the navmesh.
I branched my project from a commit made immediately before updating to AC 1.77.0. In this branch, when telling a character to pathfind to a marker outside the navmesh, AC would select the closest point to the destination marker within the navmesh and generate the correct path to that point. Then I updated this branch to AC 1.77.0, and confirmed that the behaviour has changed: when you tell a character to pathfind to a marker outside the navmesh, AC ignores the pathfinding instruction and simply generates a straight path to that marker.
This in itself is an issue (I have several markers outside the navmesh that I use for two purposes: teleporting an NPC to that exact spot and playing an animation, and also telling other characters to pathfind there [the closest point within the navmesh is good enough]). I can work around it if necessary by creating a set of two markers, but this is quite a bit of work at this point.
But I also believe that this is what is causing the issues with "keep out of player's way". When the NPC tries to pick a point to move to and settles on one outside the navmesh, instead of moving to the closest point to it within the navmesh, it just goes all the way to that point.
Recreated - thanks for the report, I will look into this.