SetFacing with memory writes

[amadmonk]

@amadmonk: I wouldn't go so far as the too say my bot is a better player than me, but it's definitely smarter. No... Wait! I meant that the other way round.

I've concentrated most of my efforts of development in to creating a multiboxing assistant. I like playing the game, but I also like "soloing" dungeons and other difficult, group-only, content by myself. I like to explore, and most regular groups I get in to have already done the content, so I don't get to look down every blind alley of a dungeon, or "kill the boring boss that never has very interesting loot." With three to ten characters all controlled by me, some days, it feels like I am playing Dungeon Siege rather than World of Warcraft.

Right now I am trying my best at emulating some of the work that Apoc has done on pre-determined navigation meshes using the world data. The pathing system I use for the non-human controlled player characters leaves much to be desired, especially in "dangerous areas" such as crossing narrow bridges. Also, pre-processed data would take a huge load off of the CPU which is already under stress by WoW.

Your bot and your goals sound very similar to mine; mostly I use my bot as a "multibox helper." I've sort of gimped my navigation code because I just haven't needed it much, but once in a while like with this, that comes back to bite me on the butt...

[EmilyStrange]

If I were you; I'd use some remoting; and follow-the-leader pathing.

Yes, I already drop bread-crumbs. All player characters drop them, but only the designated leader's are considered, for the most part. Bread crumbs are generated at 5Hz, which is sufficient for most situations before the "stuck" code has to do anything. I have a separate pathing routine that determines the quickest path to the nearest leader breadcrumb. It is this later pathing routine that sometimes gets me in trouble, e.g. when a knockback occurs in BRD or UBRS, and the player character decides to walk off the ledge because the pathing messed up when trying to return to the leader.

I really liked your implementation of using a pre-generated nav-mesh, also, in the screenshots you provided, it looks really pretty.

(The title is in reference to how the original Pacman, and later implementations on other systems, implemented the pathing for ghosts when they began chasing the player, using a basic "breadcrumb trail." IIRC, the original Pacman used a 2D array of two-bit values that indicated the direction of the player as they left the current cell. Later implementations, such as on the Amiga, used a fixed length circular buffer.)