Would it be possible to get Supcom 2 collision physics in FAF?

Unit pathing in FAF tends to get hampered mid to late game by the units colliding and bouncing off of each other especially when trapping each other in a base. This can have a fairly large impact on the games sim speed and be quite annoying to deal with. (player has to spend time sorting out units instead of progressing)

Turning off collision outright would be a terrible solution and the flying engineers mod only solves this issue for engineers and it creates a host of game balance issues. A better and fairly simple solution has already been done in Supcom 2; a sort of rubber band collision physics where units don't actually collide but instead push each other more based on how close they are. This allows the units to flow a bit like a liquid and prevents them from getting jammed.

I have no idea if this would be possible to implement via a main FAF update or via a mod. I don't know if anyone else even likes this as an idea or if anyone is capable of implementing it. I'm not a modder myself and I just think that this could be a quality of life and possibly a performance improvement as well to FAF.

@Jip As Far as i aware this is Engine Limited but jip should be able to give a clear idea

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock

It is not possible. This would require us to rewrite the engine and we can not do that as we do not have its source code. The assembly patches that we've done so far are small in comparison to what would be required.

For your idea: the path finding of Supreme Commander 2 is similar to steering behaviors combined with vector fields or the like. Implementing this in assembly is a no go, let alone integrating it with the game 🙂 .

The only thing you can do is adapt your playstyle to what the game has to offer.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Pretty sure if the pathfinding logic could be significantly improved people would have done it already as that's very high priority

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

You'd be surprised what should've been done already if it were possible 🙂

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Most flow pathfinding solution look terrible. The units don't get clumed up but they start to wiggle around and skip sideways.

@harzernoob

I think that even the relatively dated flow field pathfinding in Supcom 2 looks fine, not to mention more modern implementations

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

I definitely know the problem you are talking about. I don't think we will get a solution that can't be exploited. Like shrinking pathfinding unit footprint, or shifting layers around so that they can walk through each other. Some units give quite a wide berth as well, very unfortunate.

Sometimes on navy I switch to subs not because they are more effective, but I can actually get them out and to the battle. In this respect sera destroyers have a slight advantage.

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@zeldafanboy said in Would it be possible to get Supcom 2 collision physics in FAF?:

@harzernoob

I think that even the relatively dated flow field pathfinding in Supcom 2 looks fine, not to mention more modern implementations

Do you have an example of these modern implementations? The ones I know in SupCom 2 and PA look unrealistic indeed. But they get the pathfinding job done for sure.

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Madness 1 - 10

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@h-master
Check out the Spring engine RTS games like Beyond All Reason and Zero K

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u