Unit command lag fix

[Crotalus]

Me and Tnuoccacs have found a solution for the unit command lag which occurs when a player has too many units pathfinding at the same time. In those cases you cannot control units and they get stuck, for instance navy and SCUs/ACUs. Every Seton's player of worth have experienced it and wants a solution, especially Blackheart

The main problem is engineers taking up precious pathfinding resources when bouncing around factories.

There is a console command to increase the resources of pathfinding, it is called: "path_ArmyBudget" and it's set in the console. Cheating needs to be on for it to be changed (or if we make a non-UI mod).

I would suggest Ze_Pilot to change this default value from 1000 to 3000 and this will solve all lag connected to commanding units. Stuttering from network / cpu is still an issue.

[Kat]

Bump for awesomeness

[Blackheart]

If this works,.... AWESOME!!!!!

[Ze_PilOt]

What does the command exactly?

[Crotalus]

It is a setting for the pathfinding algorithm, seems like each army/player has 1000 "points" to use for pathfinding, when that limit is reached some units are getting stuck / not pathfinding.

Raising the credits from 1000 to 3000 seems to solve the issue, tested it yesterday with a 8 player setons and all was spamming alot of t1 engineers / units.

"path_ArmyBudget - Budget for each army to do pathfinding each tick"

[Ze_PilOt]

That must considerably hit the performances.

[Crotalus]

Well, when we tried I saw gamespeed go down maybe -0.5 when it got enough resources to give all units the ability to pathfind.

I would rather have a slightly slower game at that time compared to not be able to move units at all. And it doesn't impact performance until you actually start to reach the "stuck" level of units... mostly maps where you engineer spam I would guess.

Is it even possible to have a mod that executes "cheat-required" settings from console? I guess we could have it enabled in balance mod and test it out more

[SC-Account]

What about making it a game option in lobby so it is possible to experiment with it and find a optimum value?

[Crotalus]

An alternative is to reduce pathfinding needs, i.e. make t1 engineers not bounce with eachother. A fast test with setting them to AIR + LAND made it somewhat viable (air units = no collision and land = air didn't attack them then). An ugly hack but with less of an overall performance hit, maybe even a game speedup.

[Ze_PilOt]

Engineer spam was made unnecessary in a previous patch.
I'm not sure it need more fixing than that.

For the option, I don't think it's possible to enable it in a clean way into FA, but I will look into it.