Pathfinding - Common issues

How to have good pathfinding in the map.

Not all tilesets supports good pathfinding. Notoriously known tileset called “DOA” has amazing looking locations on the one hand, but on the other hand it has big problems with pathfinding. Character can get stucked easily when moving thru “fancy” hills and so on.

Original NWN tilesets like “Rural” don't have this kind of issue and despite looking not so great, it works perfectly.

Amazing DOA location:

Original NWN Rural location:

Learn how to display the AABB mesh:

1. In the game press Ctrl + Shift + F12 and select aabb mesh
2. Or in the toolset press Environment → Render AABB nodes

Exmples of great AABB mesh (vanilla Rural tileset):

Exmaples of broken AABB mesh (custom DOA tileset):

For DOA, the game and toolset unfortunatelly often crashes when displaying the AABB - which is propably related to the fact this tilset is broken.

As it was mentioned in the Pathfinding - Introduction to the problem, when path is being found in the tileset, the character starts to move and it looks like it tries to avoid placeables on the route to the destination.

There is several rules of thumb about properly placing the placeables to not have the character stucked on the route.

This is probably not an issue with not-solid placeables like flowers, but it is an issue with solid placeables like trees, mushrooms etc.

It may confuse the pathfinding mechanism.

Good and bad position of the tree in tiles:

This is the recipe for having the character stucked: Two solid placeables shall be not placed together with so small space that the character can't fit in between.

Good and bad positioning of the Log and Tree:

Similar applies when you place big placeable so close to the tileset object (like naother tree od stone or wall) that character can't walk acrooss.

In some cases it's not problem, but in another it is. Be cautious about this scenario and test the map if it works properly.