Circumventing the Pathfinding bug

[McPhisto]

Hi there,

I'm making a turn-based strategy game, and am using the Pathfinding object just fine. However, I've run up against the bug that other people have noticed before - namely, when it can't find a path, it crashes the application.

I've attached a screenshot of my problem:



What I want to have happen is to get rid of the blue movement squares that are on the other side of the barrier - they ought to be inacessible, but I'm not sure how to go about reliably destroying them. I would have checked whether a path could be found to them, but of course that's where the bug comes in to play.

So does anyone know of any alternatives I could try to get rid of inacessible movement squares? Any help would be really appreciated.

Cheers.

[Joshtek]

I check to see if a square is inaccessible using the overlay object. Every square is represented by 1 pixel, and I use loops do a flood fill on the source square/pixel and check to see if it has changed the colour of the potential destination square/pixel. Might not be the most efficient method, but it works.

[McPhisto]

Ah, cool, thanks for that, I'll give it a go!

[McPhisto]

This may seem quite unrelated, but I'm just trying a different way of doing things, and was wondering if anyone knew of a simple way to detect exactly how many of a single object is currently overlapping a different object.

So for example, if you have three A, and they are all overlapping B, how could you get MMF to detect that three of them are overlapping?

Thanks!

[Dynasoft]

You can use the select object to retrieve how many objects matched the conditions.
The following code would count how many A's were overlapping any B's:
[events]
*A is overlapping B
-Set counter to (Select Object) number of 'A' that matched conditions.
[/events]
So if you had 10 A's and 10 B's and 3 A's were overlapping one B and 2 more were overlapping another it would put 5 in the counter.

To get how many B's were overlapping each A you would need a loop, like this:
[events]
*Always
-Spread Value 0 in Alt Z of 'A'
*Always
-Start Loop "Overlap"
*On Loop "Overlap"
+Alt Z of 'A' = loop index("Overlap")
+B is overlapping A
-Set Alt A of 'A' to (Select Object) number of 'B' that matched conditions.
[/events]