Pathfinding

[ハートん]

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but this game is in 1.0 and the pathfinding is still abhorrent!

This is the most annoying part of the game, and it frustrates me to no end lol. Particularly at the river canyon in the border zone, if you make an order to go across it, the player will sometimes get confused, cancel the order, or take the absolute weirdest path. I've had times where I will send someone across the map and they'll run back and forth between two points endlessly.

At times I feel like I have to move them 100 meters at a time just to make sure they don't get stuck. This can be super annoying when you have multiple squad members, and you want to send one person back to base while managing the base, only to go back and check and see the guy standing in place because his pathfinding couldn't comprehend the sudden rock in the path lol.

Another annoyance, I can't figure out why it would be so difficult to make people exit a building and then calculate their paths, because EVERY time I try making someone go a long distance, they just cancel the move order and change to "Aimless"

While I was writing this I had my player moving back to base and just watched them climb up a hill, stop at the top, turn around and realize they didn't need to climb that hill :/ lol

I get it, games are a pain to program, and the size of the map must make things all the more difficult. But please fix this, it frustrates me to no end!

[Shidan]

Fact of the matter is pathfinding systems are nightmarish, even more so when the pathable area can be altered dynamically (i.e. placing buildings). It gets even worse that Kenshi wasn't originally built with this pathing system, and they had to spend nearly a year working on little but replacing it (because the old one was WAY worse).

Personally, I find it hard to hate the current one, given I experienced that old one for years. We had to deal with things like being unable to move at all because a gate was close, entire areas being unpathable because something was misplaced, and characters running hundreds of meters out of their way to get to a point 10 meters to the side. It was not pretty. So while this one has its issues, they can at least be easily resolved by simply giving manual orders.

The issues with long distance pathfinding are going to always be a problem. The game can't render the pathing for the entire map at once. This is the reason for the roads, as they are a designated area that the game knows it will be able to path along. Otherwise the character can get to the top of the hill, and then when the pathing loads for the next zone, it realizes it can't get where it needs to go from there. Be aware that if you're using pathing mods, they can cause issues like this, as they often improve local pathfinding at the cost of long distance.

Hopefully Kenshi 2 will have better pathing, since they're not cobbling together a custom game engine anymore, and are using the tried and tested 3rd party engine Unreal. But unfortunately it's extremely unlikely the original game will ever gets its pathing fixed, as it would require another engine overhaul, likely taking years.

[bunny de fluff]

If the assets in Kenshi could be exported to the unreal engine somehow, then a remake could be possible like what some people are trying to do, to make a remake of New vegas using fallout 4 modding tool. We could even play kenshi 1 as a mod in Kenshi 2!

[Hatsune Neko Gaming]

Exporting the assets to Unreal is expected to take about 6 years.
This is one reason why they working on Kenshi 2.

[ハートん]

Originally posted by white:

No one will fix it. Hope venting your frustration has helped. I've read a bit and am now also frustrated, especially being a Kenshi fanboy like most regulars here.

I got 430 hours in. I'm a fanboy too, but all the games I love have serious flaws XD

Originally posted by Shidan:

Personally, I find it hard to hate the current one

I mean, I can understand it, I don't remember if I was around during that first system. In my experience, it has always been awful lol. Sometimes buildings will be completely inaccessible, or parts of the building. I remember being unable to access my turrets on my tower, just because there was a magical invisible wall there. I don't know if this has anything to do with the path finding, but it's super annoying.

I don't use any path finding mods. And both local and long-distance path finding is ♥♥♥♥ in my eyes lol

I'm a beginner developer with Unity too, I have done some dabbling with path systems(custom ones, not navmesh). Sure, they're not fun, but everything has a solution in game design. It's just poorly designed.

[Shidan]

Originally posted by SuperGokuSaiyan:

I'm a beginner developer with Unity too, I have done some dabbling with path systems(custom ones, not navmesh). Sure, they're not fun, but everything has a solution in game design. It's just poorly designed.

I don't disagree there. But you have to remember, when Kenshi started it was a self-taught programmer building his own pathfinding engine. Back then there weren't major 3rd party game engines available, the option was to cobble together your own using various modules, or pay huge amounts of cash to license the big ones. And then later on midway through the project they had to rip that pathfinding engine out because it was too broken, and put in another one.

At this point the only thing that can fix Kenshi's main problems is a major engine swap. Something they were originally planning on doing, and that was estimated to take several years. Which the community voted overwhelmingly against in favour of the devs working on Kenshi 2. So the plans were dropped.

[Hatsune Neko Gaming]

Pathing will pretty much never be fixed. Not due to poor design or lazy devs, it's about how the core engine of the game was hand built by the Dev in his spare time for like 8 years before he got it on steam greenlight.

As Shidan said, the Devs have tried to fix it, as just like him. I seen how much worse the pathing used to be. I would get frustrated when everyone decided to move down a hill and get stuck. It was a nightmare and that was on the old map.

Least the Devs have learned from the first game. The second should be much better as it's made on a current gen engine and pathing engine. It might even use Unreal 5.

Truly the only way to fix Kenshi 1 is to upgrade the entire thing to Unreal. But that's an extremely time consuming option. We wouldn't see it for least 5 or 6 years after Kenshi 2 is released.

[ハートん]

Well, no matter how hard-coded something is, it can always be fixed. It would just take a lot of effort(depending on how well it was programmed in at first) I imagine the developers aren't willing to put in. I think putting it in a new engine would probably be more work than just rewriting the path finding system from scratch.

I can get not wanting to put in the effort though, it's a lot of work for little pay off. But damned if it isn't the biggest thing that makes me not want to play this game at times. lol, spend more time trying to get my guys to go where they want to go than playing the actual game. And I'm doing a solo run! XD

[Radiosity]

Clicking shorter distances on the map helps. Instead of clicking over the other side of the world, just click somewhere relatively close by. Then when they arrive there, click another location. It's still tedious, and there are certain areas where you'll have to babysit them more (especially that switchback mountain to the east of Hub, which is one of the worst in the game), but overall this works fine enough.

[ハートん]

Oh, I know of the old click closer areas trick. It works sometimes. Sometimes you have to just click along and make your own path(may as well not have path finding at all if you have to do this XD)

[Radiosity]

It's also heavily dependent on the area of the world. I have minimal problems sending a squad from Mourn all the way up through Shem and beyond. But anything involving complex areas like Iron Valleys or the whole of Shun/Arach... nope, back to babysitting, heh.

[ハートん]

True, I have very little issues in the holy lands, swamps, skinners roam and such. Border lands is touch and go, anywhere north of the river seems fine, but even trying to cross that river from a distance can be a pain lol. I've even had people travel from World's End all the way down to my base in the border lands on my old file in one click.

[Hatsune Neko Gaming]

Originally posted by SuperGokuSaiyan:

Well, no matter how hard-coded something is, it can always be fixed. It would just take a lot of effort(depending on how well it was programmed in at first) I imagine the developers aren't willing to put in. I think putting it in a new engine would probably be more work than just rewriting the path finding system from scratch.

They already spent over a year and two pathing engine changes trying to fix it.
For a small gaming company on it's first game, that hugely expensive. They went bankrupt at one point as well. Pink slips were getting ready to be given out to everyone.

This is pretty much the best that can be done with this engine. And since you are new to video game programming, you will learn not everything can be fixed.

But everyone above gave you some good tips on how to avoid or mitigate the worst of the pathing issues.

[ハートん]

I highly doubt they spent a year and a half on it, because if they did, and knew what they were doing, it would be fixed lol.

If they actually made it from scratch, ANYTHING can be fixed, it's their own engine, they can redesign bits of it to make things work. There's nothing, literally nothing, that can be so hard-coded it cannot be fixed. You go in, redesign the base engine if you have to. It's not just, "Some things can't be fixed." some things need skill to fix, and maybe they lack the know-how or skill to do it. If it truly is their own engine, they can fix it. Actually, I heard the game was designed on Ogre 2, so maybe you're misunderstanding what made from scratch means.

And all the tips they gave me are good, but they don't solve the issue. As I mentioned, these don't solve the issue. I was trying to get my character back to the hub from across the river, and pretty much just clicking nearby points on the map, he would sometimes get stuck running back and forth on the path, or run up the hill then run back down, or run the opposite direction for whatever reason, even though he's being chased by bandits and there's a clear path to the river straight ahead, but, noo, find the nearest road.

I love Kenshi, but the path finding is annoying as hell. In my opinion it is the worst of the flaws of this game. Sometimes gamebreakingly terrible.

[bunny de fluff]

Yeah we get it man, but for them to postpone fixing the bugs in this game, we get to play the sequel earlier(theoretically)! Because they can put this game down for a moment and concentrate on the making of the sequel, I would say it is a great trade off imo.

[ハートん]

Well, that is a good trade-off. I'm sure the sequel will have a lot of the major bugs fixed(hopefully lol). I mean, I don't wanna complain too much. This game is a buggy mess, but some of these bugs are hilarious! XD