[2021] "Stickiness" of Pathing

Thanks for the video. I was playing around with it a little more after stream and with this, I know what’s going on. Not sure how to fix it yet but I get the issue.

So, the walkable area has a defined blob for each zone. If you click on it, your character paths to that spot. Holding down the mouse button is the same as just clicking a lot except you don’t see the “click vfx”. If you click off the walkable area, you click at your feet instead. So, this makes you stop and get stuck because you are constantly just clicking in place. This is partially done for performance reasons. Detecting the nearest point on the walkable area from a point off the walkable area isn’t simple to do reliably. This is the same issue that causes loot to sometimes drop where you can’t get it. (Side note: this is why the specters in D2 don’t drop anything if you kill them while flying between platforms in Arcane Sanctuary.)

We know that movement feeling good is very important and we will look into improving this for future patches.

That’s good insight about teleport vs movement. With the way it’s set up, it totally makes sense. We do more computationally expensive operations for events that are infrequent. Someone can teleport only every x seconds due to the cooldown and it’s often in a “oh crap” situation so it needs to work.

I think that there is a way to do a more dirty solution like you have suggested to get closer and at least move instead of just sticking.

Polling along the line between the target point and your position would be too expensive but we’ve got some similar tricks to work with.

We’ve investigated this further, tried a few things, and have a solution internally that seems very promising. This will likely be included in 0.8.4.

While this would be a decent work around, we have found another method that will be more representative of the player’s intent.