The pathing with a number of the current meshes is indeed
simply miserable.
What I've found is that 'on foot' or a 'thin mount'--like a human's horse, and there are
much fewer problems with the fence posts, and lamps. However, if you are on a 'wider' mount like a Gnome's Mechostrider, the Night Elf's Saber, or heaven forbid the Draenei's Pachyderm, then pathing it
unbelievably bad.
On a pair of Gnome's that have made many trips through Duskwood, I feel like they are balls in a Pinball machine, bouncing from post to lantern, constantly getting stuck. If you slap the side of the screen enough times, they may eventually unstick themselves, but be sure not to hit it hard enough to trigger the tilt mechanism.
All it takes to see this is to use Mordd's fantastic Breakneck 2.0 profile, and wait for the Duskwood area. It even gets hung up on fences near NPCs inside Darkshire itself. The mesh so bad, I occasionally shout at my toon telling it to turn off "dumba$$ mode". The most aggravating thing about the mesh is that once Honorbuddy frees itself from one 'stuck' position, it immediately heads for the next fence or lamp post on the other side of the road to see how quickly it can get stuck again. In town areas such as Goldshire or Darkshire, Honorbuddy's 'jiggle algorithm' has to be employed just to get unstuck from being
too close to the side of a building, because the meshes path so close to them.
The areas with poor meshes are many:
- A good part of Goldshire--mostly where it traverses any of the roads where there are fence segments.
It frequently gets hung up just 'sneaking around' the Goldshire Inn. It also gets hung up between the Inn and the mailbox.
- Westfall
There are some fence posts it loves to get stuck on just south of the flight point
- Almost all of the roads in Duskwood (including Darkshire)
Just inside Darkshire, problem areas include: entering town hall, getting off the Mayor's dias, the fence segments near Madam Eva's house and near Calor, and the sides of the Carevin's house. All of these require the 'jiggle algorithm' to navigate through. Thankfully, in these areas I've never had it fail, but goodness!
- The Portals Kaalaz & Grimh in Hellfire Peninsula
It only wants to enter them from the side, which is not possible. This is so bad, that even the HB 'jiggle algorithm' to try alternate paths won't 'unstick' this one.
- Everlook
Try a profile like Striker's Felwood to Winterspring that wants to repair at Wixxrak. HB will only try to enter the building from the side and keeps insisting on trying to go through a wall. It won't even try the door. There's nothing wrong with the Profile, the problem lies with the mesh. Again, the HB 'jiggle algorithm' won't fix this.
- In Searing Gorge, the meshes path so close on the edge of a dropoff, the geometry of the toon will cause it to fall off the edge if it turns too quickly, or not quickly enough. I'm all for efficiency in pathing, but pathing on the edge of a dropoff is just silly.
- and the list goes on.
I am thankful for the extra code in Honorbuddy to 'jiggle' it out of many stuck scenarios. It works most of the time, but the fact that the
code even exists is proof enough the meshes have problems. The fact that the code is used
so much is a statement as to the degree of poor quality in the meshes.
Profile writers should only have to blackspot an occasional troublesome area. The excesses that some of them have gone to--such as blackspotting each fence segment and lamppost--is simply ludicrous. We thank them for their diligence, but honestly, that is the wrong place to be solving this problem.
The mesh is outside of the Honorbuddy core, so its not the Core's fault this is happening. But the Honorbuddy team has pulled them into a central server to be downloaded by the HB clients, and for good reason. But, the meshes
seriously need to be fixed, or allow some method for the user base to clean them up.
If you haven't encountered these problems, then just be thankful. For those of us that have them, its
infuriating.
I've speculated that perhaps the world coordinates are slightly different by a couple of units between servers. This might explain why some people have no problems, yet others are constantly screaming at their toons. A human would not even be aware of the situation because they don't navigate by world coordinates. Humans dynamically adjust to the viewed game world. But introducing such registration errors between servers would give a robot fits. Alas, I've no way to prove the hypothesis.
All I know is the current mesh situation is miserable, and isn't working out.
Just my $0.02,
CJ
