thegreatme wrote: »

When pathing first hit the PTS, we had a limit of 50 nodes or so to work with. While for bigger 24-person houses this could make completing a loop a bit on the tight side, it was doable with a bit of clever maneuvering of node position around furnishings, turns, and the like.

Take for instance when I was messing around with the Stillwater Retreat house, my first testing ground for NPC pathing. Some NPCs (like my roaming badger) I was barely able to squeeze every node in to their pathing loop properly, but I was able to do it and the results were amazing and really made the place feel alive. My naughty little badger pet was able to move from hiding in his tree burrow, to scavenging and stealing some wild game left hanging around, slink and weave under and around my bridge pathways, go get a drink, and go slinking back into hiding to rest for a while before repeating the process all over again.

Others I was able to set up quite comfortably without having to do much tweaking to their pathing at all or hit the node cap, like my bartender or my patrolling wolf.

https://youtu.be/qeLwspmdTSE?t=200

Now on live, we're limited to 30 node positions, and for a small house or small room, this is... somewhat workable, such as setting up some chickens to roam and peck at the ground, but basically impossible for larger houses with more elaborate paths unless your NPCs are just walking eas,y straight, unobstructed lines which seldom if ever exist in most houses.

Even in my medium/Classic Proudspire house, it took way too long to set up just having a single wolf roam between the upstairs and downstairs doing some idle house patrols, and it doesn't look all that great compared to how it was on the PTS, given Proudspire has lots of twists and turns and odd angles for my NPCs to have to maneuver around that I can't ignore unless I want my wolf popping on top of walls or furnishings.

For much larger 24-person Notable houses I can't even imagine setting up proper pathing loops with nearly half as many nodes available as were on the PTS.

50 was, in my opinion at least, a perfect number to work with, but 30 is just a headache for any spaces that aren't small or totally clear of obstructions.