Adjust the build skirt of naval factories

what I meant is that a land unit gets build on a point that's not reachable for said unit after the construction is complete. Can't move back onto a factory afterall

@cheeseberry said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

what I meant is that a land unit gets build on a point that's not reachable for said unit after the construction is complete. Can't move back onto a factory afterall

My mistake, I thought they did have something similar. See also their occupation layers:

0d9e9930-d2d8-4a9a-9c45-24136ab2f5ba-image.png

Only quantum gates can be traversed through 🙂 .

Naval yards have something similar, but that won't fix the issue: the issue is not that the unit is colliding with the factory it is building. The issue is that it can not move towards the roll off point. Therefore it computes an alternative location that is close to the roll off point, and that causes it to (eventually) clip into all sorts of things. See also my previous post:

For your idea, this is the roll off point for a land factory:

f70bfe3e-ae84-43e2-9a1f-a4444cd47395-image.png

Which is guaranteed to be clear of other things, including other buildings.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

You can walk through a quantum gate? Learned something today 😄

Also yes, the issue isn't caused by the ship colliding with the factory after completion, but I think the issue might be solved by disabling said collision for a couple seconds after completion.

I'm not aware of a method to skip collisions all together, I don't think there's such a flag.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

the massive units, such as the GC seem to have something like that.

They ignore buildings during pathing all together, dealing damage to opponent's buildings they step on but crucially just passing through (over?) your own buildings without effecting them.

No clue if something like that is doable for navy units, but at least something kinda similar exists

Yes, but I'm not sure how we can switch between the type of pathing for individual units. There is no flag that you set, it is a blueprint value that determines what it can and can not walk over, set during loading.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

hmm I see 😕

could we maybe adapt the behavior land factories use with their roll off?

It uses the same function, the difference is in the units. A battleship just requires a lot of space to leave the dock.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

While it uses the same function, the land unit spawns on unpathable terrain, while the navy unit does not, right?

So could we maybe make that part of the factory where the battleship is being built unpathable too to achieve the same "phase through unpathable terrain" effect?

Yes, and it can phase through the naval factory. It can already do that 🙂 . But the issue is in the roll off point, not where the unit spawns. It is too close to the naval factory.

And that doesn't remove the issue that if placed improperly you can create a pathfinding garbage can between naval factories, especially for - yet again, battleships and the like.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

It seems to me like I don't actually understand the exact problem you want to solve.

For me the main problem with navy factory pathing are the ~5 seconds after a unit is built being very inconsistent. It takes seemingly random paths, sometimes driving into a wall or the naval factory it was built from, and then just stopping there.
The problem could be summarized as: "Make navy unit roll of consistent for all queued movement directions"

This could, I think, be solved by having the ships phase through the factory that built them and adding two horizontal roll off points in addition to the two vertical roll of points that already exist.

Is your problem description closer to: "Make it impossible to block navy traffic with naval factories." ?

The roll off points are already solved and are part of the patch that is released today. The issue is that naval factories do not guarantee that there is sufficient space around the factory to allow ships to leave the docks properly. Combine that with the hectic pathing of ships and you have a pathfinding mess that is frustrating, especially for larger ships.

Note that all other factories do make this guarantee, hence we in general experience no pathing issues with those except when we chuck it with 100 assisting engineers.

See also:

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@cheeseberry said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

This could, I think, be solved by having the ships phase through the factory that built them and adding two horizontal roll off points in addition to the two vertical roll of points that already exist.

And this is not a solution, it is a band aid. Same for decreasing the size of the naval factories, or decreasing the size of naval units in general. They all affect the immersion of the game, which is relevant for casual players.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I continue to be confused:

@jip said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

But the issue is in the roll off point, not where the unit spawns. It is too close to the naval factory.

@jip said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

The roll off points are already solved and are part of the patch that is released today.

So, if I understand correctly, the first stop is/was moving the roll of points further away from the factory, and you have already patched that in.

Now you want to ensure that the factories are actually placed far enough apart that said further out roll of points are not intersecting with another factory by increasing the skirt size?

My first hunch is that this would create more problem than it solves, but everything else you have implemented so far was great, so I'd say just put it on faf dev so I can change my mind 😄

@jip said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

We could also only apply a vertical stretch, but not a horizontal stretch.

a7c2864e-30b0-4763-983e-d5583069a38a-image.png

That allows them to be cliff buildable in the majority of cases as we have right now, but still encourages people to space them out more.

Wouldn't it also make sense to only stretch the skirt in the direction of the roll off point instead of symmetrically? This would make it impossible to place your factories so, that the ships would have to go into a cliff to leave the factory.
But it's still strange, as naval factories aren't symmetric, one side of the map will have an advantage in an up/down split map, because you'd have to place your factory much farther from the cliff on one side of the map, than on the other.

Wouldn't it also make sense to only stretch the skirt in the direction of the roll off point instead of symmetrically?

Roll off point is determined on where your rally point is, it can be either at the top or to the bottom of the naval factory. Hence it is symmetrical.

But it's still strange, as naval factories aren't symmetric, one side of the map will have an advantage in an up/down split map, because you'd have to place your factory much farther from the cliff on one side of the map, than on the other.

At the moment the horizontal distance has not been changed - what you see here (the green build skirt, not the circles - that is something else) is (horizontally) the same as it is right now.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Another possible solution: How about adjusting the behavior for dragging a line of naval factories so that they are spaced apart farther than they are currently, while not forbidding the placement of individual factories to be as close as they are now.

A similar, albeit much more conservative, version of this already exists in the base game where horizontally dragged lines of factories are spread apart farther than they need to be, presumably for pathing reasons:

Forged Alliance 20_06_2022 00_46_48.png

@jip said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

Roll off point is determined on where your rally point is, it can be either at the top or to the bottom of the naval factory. Hence it is symmetrical.

oh didn't know that, i thought ships are always made facing the same direction.
i had that problem, when i placed factories over a cliff to the north, then the ships would still start facing south and would path into the cliff and turn there and crash with the factory etc. But i just tested it and they mirror. I must have been stupid somehow 🤷
i went through the replay and factories assisting other, seem to only lazily copy their rally point
screen.jpg
The right factory calculates the roll of point from it's own rally point, though it uses that of the other fac, so the frig comes out drives into the shore and the has to turn.

@jip said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

At the moment the horizontal distance has not been changed - what you see here (the green build skirt, not the circles - that is something else) is (horizontally) the same as it is right now.

yeah i thought like vertically if one team has the top side and the other has the bottom, but if they are symmetrical(top/down) it doesn't matter

@nex said in Adjust the build skirt of naval factories:

i went through the replay and factories assisting other, seem to only lazily copy their rally point

Yep, I noticed this particular issue too. That is a bug, one that I will fix for the next release

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Maybe a hotkey to rotate factories/structures before building 90-180