Units in formation beome uncontrollable or stuck

[elexis]

Often when switching betwen formations, units become uncontrollable.

This is one of the worst and ugliest bugs in the game. If we don't fix it for this release, then the ticket should be pushed to the next milestone without changing the priority. This should not appear in anything calling itself beta either.

[elexis]

Minute 24:40 more than 100 units of the blue player became uncontrollable. Sample from ​https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/21001-units-stuck-running-in-place/

[Itms]

We could disable formations as we did for one alpha (I don't remember which one) but spending time fixing that while we plan to rework formations is probably a waste.

What do you think? Does that happen frequently? Would players be infuriated to see formations temporarily disabled?

[elexis]

It should block the release in theory, but not this one. Since formations are disabled by default, the bug can be avoided.

[elexis]

About minute 22 of this A21 replay, the units of the yellow player (Vercingetorix) are showing this bug.

[echotangoecho]

In my opinion, the formations should be disabled until this bug is fixed, as this bug makes formations pretty much unusable at the moment and not many players do use formations as far as I'm aware, the players that do use them are mostly unaware that this bug exists, and it can be very irritating for them when this bug does occur. It shouldn't be too difficult to disable them (see r17028, don't know where they where disabled).

[fatherbushido]

If we hide that, we will code even more things without taking care of formations and it will become even worse.

[wraitii]

I would be in favor of entirely removing the formation code we have now. It's imo irremediably broken (as in it doesn't even work well), and we would be better served with removing it entirely and then reimplementing it when we've found a sane way to do that.

edit: to give a bit more detail, the current formation code: -is useless because formations don't really do anything -makes units move weirdly when it works (pick a long line and you'll see what I mean, makes no sense when it turns for example) -is slow -makes CCmpUnitMotion needlessly complicated -makes UnitAI.js horrible (honestly…) -is a mess and in a state of life support since like Alpha 13

[Itms]

I am all for removing the "automatic formation" when a group of units gets an order. The code for that is messy at least, and probably unneeded if we have an actual formation system (i.e. a system where players have to create a formation or not depending on the situation, to add a layer of strategy).

I did that as a WIP some time ago and Yves used that WIP when he started working on formations. I'd suggest waiting for him before committing anything, in order not to break his work.

[elexis]

At minute 22, the yellow player yoreii experiences a formation bug where units don't disband.

[elexis]

Backlogging due to lack of progress

[temple]

I think this might've been fixed by r19709.

[elexis]

refs #4990

[Imarok]

Move tickets to Simulation as UI & Simulation got some sub components.

[wraitii]

I can't reproduce this with ​https://github.com/wraitii/0ad/tree/D13_outtakes I'm not very familiar with the issue though so if someone else can confirm it no longer happens, it'd be great.

[Freagarach]

I've been trying to reproduce this on current SVN (r23575), but nothing I did could cause the described symptoms.

For the record, the things I tried:

• Moving many units without formation to one spot, then invoke a formation (tried using all possible formations).
• Swichting one formation into another, many combinations possible, I might have had them all. (Also did that in rapid succession.)
• Moving formations.
• Performing commands other than walk (build, attack, gather).
• Moving in/through dense forests (other pathfinding struggles do occur).
• Combining two ~100 units large formations into one and performing the same steps as above.

[wraitii]

This seems to have stopped happening as described, and further #4990 is more descriptive.

I'm closing as duplicate and moving the other to A24, I'm not certain the formation-unitAI issue has been fixed.