World in Conflict Interview with Massive Entertainment
Artificial IntelligenceYouGamers: How about unit AI? How much effort have you put to making units move and react intelligently? Westberg: A lot, a lot of effort has gone into that. We've been working very hard with pathfinding and avoidance. There are two sides to that: we want to make it look good, so [the infantry] walks in a [realistic] manner, but we also want to make it play well. In some cases, units will actually slightly intersect and [move through] each other, rather than just getting stuck at one end of a bridge or something like that. They will try for a while to just sort it out, and if they can't, they'll go f*** it, I'll just go through you. This is all to help out gameplay. You don't usually see this happening, but it helps the game a lot. You will very rarely, or never I should say, find units stuck and not able to go where they're supposed to. Also, different units have different types of movement, so you'll see helicopters moving the way they should… Karlson: Banking... Westberg: and doing all that, and there's a custom physics system for tanks, so that even though there are a hundred or so tanks on the battlefield, all of them will be physically simulated as they go over the landscape.  Karlson: And the question is - there is a very fine balance to finding the point where it looks great and it plays right. These are on the opposite ends of the same line, I think. It's almost impossible to achieve perfect visuals - talking of pathfinding and moving - and perfect playability. If you have visually perfect pathfinding, that means units block each other. If they are allowed to block each other 100% in all cases, you'll have problems. Westberg: It takes a lot of time and a good amount of space to turn around a car, and it's not necessarily fun to watch. Karlson: For us, it's always a battle of playability and visuals. But we're getting there. Westberg: We've been talking about having cars [prefer] driving on roads, because that's what they're supposed to do. We actually prototyped that, and it just makes people angry. You see, if you want to move your car over there, and it decides to take this route because there's a road, and gets blown to pieces by enemy tanks... that's why we decided to have the units go where you tell them to, rather than try to look pretty. Karlson: We have a very free-form, sandbox approach to the gameplay. We can't dictate where the unit is supposed to go - it's just not fun. Westberg: We also did something that is pretty cool: the path map, which decides where units can walk and where they can't, is dynamic and updateable. So if you blow up a building or burn a forest using one of the Tactical Aids [e.g. a napalm bomb], your tanks can now drive through there. Before, only infantry could go there, which is the special ability of infantry units. When you destroy buildings and burn down forests, that dramatically changes how the map plays.
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