Watch our lead developer explain how RTS pathfinding and crowd simulation work together - and why it’s one of the hardest problems in real-time strategy games. Find out how Age of Empires 4 simplifies pathfinding, where StarCraft 2’s crowd sim still struggles, and how we’re solving all of it... in ZeroSpace. If you’ve wondered why your army sometimes just gives up, or why great unit movement feels so good, this is for you.show more

Line move supremacy!

The way I'd picture doing it would be to treat each NPC as a 'space' warp of a grid. So if the area was treated as an image, each NPC would basically be cutting a hole in the image and the image warps around it. Like a little blackhole. Then NPCs that are pathing just follow the simple grid as normal with conventional pathfinding, but they follow it based on the now warped version so they all walk around each other. It seems like that would combine a simple pathfind for each, and then just remap it to a more complicated version, but they wouldn't need to have direct awareness of all other units, they'd just be walking based on the warped image they all contribute to. Basically they are all moving in straight lines but through warped spacetime. I would have thought something like fluid sims are far more complex and work with more particles. So isn't this something that could be done (or helped) by the gpu?

Very interesting! Even deeper tech stuff on performant pathfinding and avoidance that is networkable is always welcome (but it's understandable if you keep your gold protected! =)

Will you be able to attack the early game? Main reason Starcraft2 failed is there's no rush. Secondary reason SC2 failed was gimmick units like Adept, Oracle.

This is amazing thank you for the explanations

Awesome work. Rly like what this can do to the sense of scale of the game.

Have you considered having units check a further distance away every 8 ticks or something, to keep them getting stuck? It would still be performant, since it’s not every tick. (Staggered per unit, so as to not induce lag spikes, eg. check if unitID % 8 == tickNumber % 8).

Amazing work I did try something similar I wish I have knowledge to do it like this though

Something I must watch for sure :) - let it fly through universe to get more attention 🫡🥳. I hope that this game (Zerospace) is going to be something remarkable in the future.

really interesting, thank you for this!

Correct me if Im wrong, but wouldnt alot of the bodyblocking issue in particular be solved by moving away from the idea that so many units need to stop moving entirely as they attack? I think it could instead be traded for movement debuffs instead with a "Hold Position" command

Excellent video! Very cool. Gave me a ton to research

cool game!

Looks cool 👌

This was interesting!

@Blizzard_Ent

This looks like art. Elegant.

Not sure if this fixes the problem or is just a workaround but if some characters can’t find the correct path, they could stop by the rest of the group and just look like they were attacking but their damage gets transferred to another character that is in range.

love this topic! got a youtube link? so i can put it on my watch list!

Really cool insights! Thanks for putting this video together!

Now this is some great marketing content

Awesome breakdown

Thank you for this nice explanatory video.

Impressive, looking forward to it! ;;)

Youtube link:

Shameful starcraft ripoff

The demo vanished :(

don't you precalculate dynamic movement paths on textures? then narrow down possibilities from there? for X*Y map, run calculations for a 1-sphere ball w/ radius R (or a square with size r*r). the fastest paths then take far less calculations. if you use mipmaps it gets better.

Ok, I'm in 🔥 Awaiting insights about netcode 🙏

@grok give me a list of game that can rival total war games