Ascended-AI-Pathfinding: worse than Evolved - what is your experience?

[Arkolucious]

To be clear:

In Local Games there seems to be a noticeable improvement. Overall dinos have a better chance to get through a complexer setup of obstacles. However i noticed some problems that are reproduceable and in addition, on official servers, the pathfinding is sometimes completley wrecked for some reason.

My observations are from official EU-Servers - Ping around 80-140.

I picked 5 dinos and told them all to follow me - intention was to lead them to another base camp that was about 2000 meters away. So they new AI should be somewhat helpful....

 

my experience, the more dinos you take, the more mistakes are happening:

 

 

1. usually one or two out of five dinos get totaly stuck whenever i move more than 100 meters away and do not even try to follow any more.

2. Often two or even three of them take a very strang path to follow me, no direct line when the path to my position is free - they evade and avoid invisible stuff - at least it looks like it.

3. When i return to the stuck dinos, they sometimes get unstuck and start following again.......sometimes even that does not help. I have to kill or chop the obstacle, they are sticking at.

4. Sometimes Dinos simply runing arround and not following at all. This seems to be related with a latency/hitbox problem.

 

5. Dinosaurs ignore the following distance settings. Sometimes they keep the distance...sometimes they completely run into your character making it impossible to escape. You are blocked and have to relogg to solve the problem. Eevn on highest setting for following this happens very often. In Evolved they only thing to avoid was they absolute closest range. Now it is a huge problem if you take more than one dinosaur with you.

 

 

 

Where do they get stuck and how?

 

1. Two trees, that are very close to each other. Dinos try to walk between them and get stuck on the half way through. For some reason the AI quits here and gives no orders to try another way. This works 100% all the time in this case. A guranteed stucking problem - was also like that in evolved.

2. sharp angles - easy observable on  your own base entrance: Doors. Whenever you leave a door open, the create that 90 degree angle - depending in which direction it opened up.

So if i dino (f.e. a raptor) has a door in its way, he ignores it completley, runs into it and get stuck - no reaction after that. Closing the door and ordering again solves the problem.....but this should not happen in my opinion.

3. Sometimes it seems to be server related behaviour. Not only that dinos sometimes make the drunken dance without any obvious reason, sometimes they manage to walk or even pass through objects.........and then the server/client suddenly seem to realize: "hey, you are not allowed on that position. Freeze!"...and than only killing obstacles frees them. Nothing else works.

4. The strange behaviour not to follow my command allthough there is nothing obvious in its way can be a tiny dinosaur as the compy, tiny insects or a corpse it tries to loot. Very often raptors for example speed up to 100%, circeling its target and missing any attack due to this behaviour. It is stuck in an endless "attack & miss-loop".

 

 

If i remember Evolved correclty, it had a lot of problems of dinos getting stuck....but it was not as horrible as i hav experienced it in Ark Ascended with its new AI-pathfinding (online official servers). At least they were able to follow you in a straight line, even in that case Ascended struggles sometimes. It is nice to see that raptors now can walk through selfmade, walled labyrhints to proof, how much of an improvement the AI seems to be.

In reallity it suffers from all those cases above so much, that required almost an hour for something, that was supposed to be a 5-10 minute walk. Everytime i went 200-300 meters further, i had to stop, waiting about 30-60 seconds for the dinos eventually to arrive....and in many cases i had to go back 100-150 meters and free up the lost ones.

 

I hope this is not the end of line - i am not sure what the reasons are, why it sucks so badly on Servers at the moment - although when it comes to the dinosaurs hit accuracy (raptors where fearsome enemies for beginners in Evolved, now you can solo an alpha with a spear in simple cloth armor even without any speed-advantages).

 

The cases i listet above should be investigated in my opinion and get fixed or at least improved. When it comes to the server settings & performance....well, let us hope they get better over time.

 

What are your experiences with dinos? Is it all fine or have you encountered simelar problems? I understand it works a bit better, if you only take a single dinosaur with you - but i intenionally wanted to test, what happens if you take an entire pack with you.

 

 

Greetings

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 20, 2023 by Arkolucious

[Scheneighnay]

Haven't tried multiple dinos, but with single dinos on a server it's been hit or miss.

I've had my pego follow me around through my base about 200m away when I wasn't even aware it was on follow.

But at the same time I've had wild baby dinos get stuck in every rock

[DEDFUZE]

I agree with you, the problem with the AI is tedious in official servers

[Khruk]

Pathfinding is horribly bad. Tamed dinos can't walk in a straight line, but you steal a dino egg and every wild one can make a bee line straight to you.

[Noa]

Its old problem when you get mobbed with own tames.

Going on boss will take ages unstucking and evading own tames until you get to obelisk.  In old times cryopods solved this problem. 

Edited November 21, 2023 by Noa

[PhotekPlays]

give old pathing

[KingOfAshes]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the issues are down to the simplistic walking animations that cannot cope with the more complex environment geometry. Especially in the Island which has incredibly higher density of rocks, trees and sharp elevated terrain compared to DLC maps that followed it. I think you can also tell by some of the much later creatures that were introduced with much more refined and higher quality animations.

[USPfan]

It’s unfortunate the animation in this game wasn’t updated along with the UE5 world. But I guess that would involve actual major changes and they’d probably charge us $50 again. Oh wait… 

To stay on topic with pathfinding, I tried taming a 150 Yuti last night. Instead of climbing on top of the iceberg he stayed below it underwater. Until he drowned. I wasn’t even in the area around him. I’d say the path finding is still broken. 

[Eclipse]

The dumpster fire that is dino pathfinding and following is the reason I'm not buying ASA.  It was so ridiculously frustrating in ASE trying to do anything with a group of dinos that it ruined the late game and boss fights, unless you used mods (like the cheap "cryopod" without cryo sickness mod).  For a game that is built around the concept of taming and using dinos for things, it's unacceptable for it to be an infuriating chore to do even the simplest things.  Dinos constantly getting stuck on everything, nothing, and each other is just not OK.  I won't be giving them another penny unless this is VASTLY improved. Which is sad, because I would like to, otherwise.  For single player or private server play, anyway. No way I would ever play the public multiplayer hack and grief experience. 

[yarnevk]

It is not just server, the AI itself has some real problems even in SP.

Dinos on follow not going thru door seems to be trap avoidance code, which makes no sense if they are a tame on follow.    Follow should mean follow me thru the door.    I will have a follow chain and have to drive every single dino thru the door.  If the hitbox is not over the threshold they will refuse and pivot to the fence even if you poke their nose thru the door to give them a hint.  This is even though otherwise they seem to vector on you completely ignoring your pathway around things, getting stuck on rocks or drowning themselves in deep water, but if left on wander they will make it halfway across the map (great we have map icons now!)

Yet put them on wander small dinos will escape thru the door before you even get thru to close it. 

Rafting follow is even worse, oxy breathers will intentionally drown themselves by swimming under the raft even if you are at the shoreline for land or easy surfacing (lost my high level beaver to this and the spawn is depleted).  Water breathers will breach (even in wide open ocean) in their attempt to reach you on follow and die, or the hitbox will get stuck hovering over coral or stuck in rocks (seems the art team detailing water floors did not discuss this new design with AI team....).   Raft riders even worse because the raft and structure goes thru anything outside the rudder hitbox, and will leave your land tame stuck high and dry on a rock.  

I like the idea of journeying with dinos but seems they did not consider in the AI rewrite that without cryopods they need to make the PVE journey viable and not make it a PVAI joke.

Edited December 9, 2023 by yarnevk

[TheTrueVocalHero]

I’ve too experienced all of the above AI Dino issues since I started playing and mixed with horrendous official server latency issues and overall responsiveness when inputting simple button presses, makes both tamed and wild Dinos AI 10x worse. The AI is trash on ASA and as others have said, at least on ASE my tames could follow me in a straight line but ASA can hardly do that even to the point where I’ve seen raptors running backwards trying to follow me. Wasn’t this supposed to be a revolutionary new ARK experience built from the ground up? I’ve no doubt they just copy and pasted the code for the majority into UE5 hoping the program would do the rest. It’s stable on ps5 in the sense of it hasn’t crashed once for me but that’s just one hurdle. It’s a waste of money for sure and stupidly many of us fell for it again. I’ve played a few hours and at this point with all of the other issues I’ve given up for now. Main thing is though folks! They’re working on some more paid DLC for us.. 😀! 🙄

[Scheneighnay]

Now that I've been raising raptors, there's a definite inconsistency.

Whistled 3 juveniles to follow me outside, one did, the other 2 embedded themselves into different corners and still wouldn't follow me even after I took the walls out.

The only command they would listen to is "go here" which eventually got them outside.

Even when whistled individually sometimes they would still just run around in circles.

 

I haven't taken my pack out yet so I can't speak for how they do things in normal scenarios, but telling 3 babies to path through a door simultaneously seems to break them.

I haven't had any problems with telling my paracer to follow my deinosuchus or vice-versa, however 

[Zapha]

I was in the forest, looking for hives, two cats jumped on me. I decided to let them kill me and did nothing. They circeled around me, tried to attack me, but always missed, so I suicided.

Edited December 11, 2023 by Zapha

[yarnevk]

One thing I found out is the trap avoidance code that tamed followers seem to be stoopidly using, as far as the dino doors are concerned if you remove the fence foundation you used to place the dino doors in the first place - they will happily train right thru following the leader.   Complete opposite with the threshold diverting into the fence to avoid the door - it is the threshold not the door itself.     

The downside with removed threshold is wanderers on escape will dogpile the door trying to GTFO.   So you have a saddled clusterF trying to stem that tide.  

 

[ughhhhh]

Dino follow AI is absolutely garbage. The only way you can get them to walk in a straight line is to put up bulletin boards so the Dino’s can use that as bumpers like your at the bowling alley!!! Great AI guys!!!!