Suggested improvement in manual for Pathfinding

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Units do not overlap each other and use different ways if there are several free ways.
  • I'm new to Construct3 and just spent way too long trying to figure out how Pathfinding's waypoints work and thought I'd spare anyone else the trip. I just wanted to suggest that the excellent "Intermediate Example" of "Pathfinding" be referenced in the manual in the section on Pathfinding. It answered almost all of my questions.

    Currently the manual section on Pathfinding has two places where the existing text could use the pointer.

    In one place it says only: "The nodes can be retrieved (only after On path found) using the NodeCount and NodeXAt/NodeYAt expressions. "

    and later on it says: "! You can also use the Move To behavior's Move along Pathfinding path action as an alternative, since the Move To behavior uses a different movement algorithm."

    Then, having found the Pathfinding example, I spent another 20 minutes trying to figure out where the heck the variable "LoopIndex" was declared and initialized and updated,as well as trying to confirm that it was zero based and that it was incrementing, not decrementing.

    I imagine that implicit declaration of LoopIndex in a System repeat statement is well documented somewhere, but it wasn't in the short path I took to get here so I missed it. Yes, if I couldn't puzzle it out I was going to come to the Forum and ask, but I hated to do that before I'd done my homework!

    Otherwise, this looks like a really nice product and decent manual! I just upgraded from "free" to "Personal" and ability to get to JavaScript and JSON were selling points.

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  • loopindex is a system expression, it's documented here:

    construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/system-reference/system-expressions

    Every object/plugin/behavior in Construct has lots of useful expressions. When editing any event or action you can click on "Find expressions" link to browse them:

  • The approach taken in the manual is that since loops are part of the System object, they are documented in the System section. Since it is not strictly related to the Pathfinding behavior, it is thus not covered in the Pathfinding behavior section of the manual.

  • Thank you Ashley for the reply! Yes, I agree that discussion of loops belongs in the System section and not in the Pathfinding behavior section. I think I was just mentally wandering for bringing that up.

    And, yes, I also noticed the resurrected post from 2 years ago a few posts above this one, with a link to the right place to file Bug reports and a link to the right place to file suggestions.

    I will leave this post here but head over there to (re)post my suggestion about a cross-reference in the manual to the Pathfinding Intermediate example. I'll skip any further discussion of the loop variable.

    Thank you!

  • Actually the area for suggestions appears to deal entirely with features people want to vote on, and doesn't seem a good place to post a suggestion for the manual or documentation -- there isn't even a category for that.

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