17th March 2009 - Route-Finding update

by **Lalas96** Tue Mar 17, 2009 3:01 pm

In this week’s update, we’ve implemented an extremely frequently-requested improvement to route-finding. This should particularly improve the playability of the game in laggy situations.

For a long time (well, forever really) it has been the case that when you click to move somewhere, your character would occasionally run in the wrong direction for a few steps before turning around and going to the point you actually selected. Fixing this has been a popular request for a long time. It might sound like a simple task, but in fact it was very difficult, which is why we hadn’t managed it until now.

To fix the problem we have had to move the route-finding calculation onto our servers, so that the route is always calculated from the correct spot. However, before we could do that we had to upgrade all of our servers to be able to handle the extra computations required! We’ve finally made this investment, and have been able to update the route-finding accordingly.

We think this is a great example of a small change which should make a big difference to how the game feels to play.

Mod Michael
Game Engine Developer