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cTrix
cTrix
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[NEW LOW] NPCs room priority for equal function rooms  Empty [NEW LOW] NPCs room priority for equal function rooms

Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:14 pm
1.In my current hospital I opened a surgery clinic next to the the emergency clinic. This is the layout:
[NEW LOW] NPCs room priority for equal function rooms  Ba076e116299eb6111e5bcad30c023b6

Following behavior occurs with surgery patients and clinic doctor. They will randomly walk around to the emergency clinics bathroom instead of using the bathroom adjacent to the waiting area. This is inconsistent and I can only assume they pick one randomly.

2. I have my emergency clinic separated from the hospital. They are quite far apart, so I build a break room for each area. In fact, I copied the first break room and pasted it into the other area so they are in fact identical.

Following behavior: Staff from the clinic will randomly wander all the way to other side of the map to get a snack out of the hospital break room. Vice versa for hospital staff going to the clinic breakroom. Again this behavior is inconsistent.

In both instances it would be better if NPCs would prefer the closest room.

3. If there are multiple waiting areas, Patients will apparently pick one at random. For example if there is a waiting area for the doctor's office and another waiting area for the STAT lab, patients will randomly sit in the STAT lab area even if the doctors waiting area has free seats, and vice versa.

This can cause huge walking distances for patients and waste a large amount of time where they keep doctors and lab techs waiting. It's a necessary feature here that Patients pick a waiting area based on proximity to the room they are waiting for, otherwise you force players always have their labs directly next to their clinics. And this forces lab techs to walk possibly huge distances to pick up hospital tests (which I had happen and caused the techs to lose samples, causing patients to get stuck in beds in a permanent waiting state for their lab results).

Here is an image of patients sitting in my construction side outside the non functioning Sonar Lab. These patients are waiting for a clinic examination. They walked all the way around  the map to get in there.
[NEW LOW] NPCs room priority for equal function rooms  7b665344a2a2e6962e31c570e6e2a70d


Last edited by cTrix on Thu Nov 15, 2018 2:44 pm; edited 1 time in total
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slink
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Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:34 pm
Message reputation : 50% (2 votes)
They choose their toilet (and vending machine, and water cooler, and every other thing that occurs in multiple) by the shortest straight-line path, regardless of how far they have to walk to actually get there.
igor.oxymoron
igor.oxymoron
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:19 pm
Hello! Thanks for the report!
Actually - every one character in the game is trying to reserve objects for himself (in almost all procedures/activities/etc) that are closest to him not taking into account walls (long or short path). It is up to player to optimize his/her hospital enviroment regarding those issues.
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slink
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:36 pm
What a fascinating take on path-finding. "We cannot be bothered to work it out properly so you players deal with it." I don't know of anyone in real life who passes by a functional bathroom while in dire need of same, because they heard pipes gurgling in the wall of their room from a bathroom four times as far away by foot travel. Razz
igor.oxymoron
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:50 pm
slink wrote:What a fascinating take on path-finding.  "We cannot be bothered to work it out properly so you players deal with it."  I don't know of anyone in real life who passes by a functional  bathroom while in dire need of same, because they heard pipes gurgling in the wall of their room from a bathroom four times as far away by foot travel.  Razz

We have never said that! We are working hard on every game aspect - we work on every aspect to be polished, unbugged, enjoyable. There are some issues that are critical and the others - not critical. First we need to eliminate all critical ones. Then there will be time to resolve, rework, modify other issues.
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slink
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 3:01 pm
igor.oxymoron wrote:
slink wrote:What a fascinating take on path-finding.  "We cannot be bothered to work it out properly so you players deal with it."  I don't know of anyone in real life who passes by a functional  bathroom while in dire need of same, because they heard pipes gurgling in the wall of their room from a bathroom four times as far away by foot travel.  Razz

We have never said that! We are working hard on every game aspect - we work on every aspect to be polished, unbugged, enjoyable. There are some issues that are critical and the others - not critical. First we need to eliminate all critical ones. Then there will be time to resolve, rework, modify other issues.

I know you are working on many issues and that this one is not critical. However, you did say that.

igor.oxymoron wrote:Hello! Thanks for the report!
Actually - every one character in the game is trying to reserve objects for himself (in almost all procedures/activities/etc) that are closest to him not taking into account walls (long or short path). It is up to player to optimize his/her hospital enviroment regarding those issues.
igor.oxymoron
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 3:05 pm
Well - but i did not say: "We cannot be bothered to work it out properly so you players deal with it." - because this is a lie.
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slink
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 3:14 pm
igor.oxymoron wrote:Well - but i did not say:  "We cannot be bothered to work it out properly so you players deal with it." - because this is a lie.

"Up to the player" means "you players deal with it". You also made no mention of working on it eventually. True, "we cannot be bothered to work it out properly" was an inflammatory description of your failure to mention that it would be worked on, but admit it. You did not say what you meant there. And I followed my post with a razzy laugh, so I was razzing you. Perhaps I should not have been so familiar.
igor.oxymoron
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 3:30 pm
cTrix wrote:
2. I have my emergency clinic separated from the hospital. They are quite far apart, so I build a break room for each area. In fact, I copied the first break room and pasted it into the other area so they are in fact identical.

Following behavior: Staff from the clinic will randomly wander all the way to other side of the map to get a snack out of the hospital break room. Vice versa for hospital staff going to the clinic breakroom. Again this behavior is inconsistent.

In both instances it would be better if NPCs would prefer the closest room.

3. If there are multiple waiting areas, Patients will apparently pick one at random. For example if there is a waiting area for the doctor's office and another waiting area for the STAT lab, patients will randomly sit in the STAT lab area even if the doctors waiting area has free seats, and vice versa.

This can cause huge walking distances for patients and waste a large amount of time where they keep doctors and lab techs waiting. It's a necessary feature here that Patients pick a waiting area based on proximity to the room they are waiting for, otherwise you force players always have their labs directly next to their clinics. And this forces lab techs to walk possibly huge distances to pick up hospital tests (which I had happen and caused the techs to lose samples, causing patients to get stuck in beds in a permanent waiting state for their lab results).

Here is an image of patients sitting in my construction side outside the non functioning Sonar Lab. These patients are waiting for a clinic examination. They walked all the way around  the map to get in there.

Could you, please, upload a saved game where you experiencing this issue - it will be very helpful for us to analyze it.
Thanks in advance!
jan.oxymoron
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 3:36 pm
slink wrote:
igor.oxymoron wrote:Well - but i did not say:  "We cannot be bothered to work it out properly so you players deal with it." - because this is a lie.

"Up to the player" means "you players deal with it".  You also made no mention of working on it eventually.  True, "we cannot be bothered to work it out properly" was an inflammatory description of your failure to mention that it would be worked on, but admit it.  You did not say what you meant there.  And I followed my post with a razzy laugh, so I was razzing you.  Perhaps I should not have been so familiar.

Hi, let's not let this misunderstanding get out of hand Smile It's true that with our tiny team we've had to make a lot of compromises on the way and we'll be still trying to improve on as many of these as possible. Looking at the technical side, there should be some ways to improve this particular system without a huge CPU/memory penalty (probably by caching distances between rooms), but it's far from a simple task - let me keep it on the list in either case.
cTrix
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Wed Nov 14, 2018 5:13 pm
igor.oxymoron wrote:Hello! Thanks for the report!
Actually - every one character in the game is trying to reserve objects for himself (in almost all procedures/activities/etc) that are closest to him not taking into account walls (long or short path). It is up to player to optimize his/her hospital enviroment regarding those issues.

Then why are staff sometimes walking all the way to the other end of the hospital to use a fridge if they have a fridge that's closer to them? Someone else is already reserving it?

Why are patients chosing seats in a different waiting area than where the doctors are. These seats aren't close to the reception or entrance. They spawn at the top of the map and so just sit at the opposite end of the hospital?

It would be better if instead of looking for objects that are closest, they would look for rooms that are closest. And for waiting rooms, waiting rooms closest to what they are waiting for.

Lots of issues here that are causing significant issues.
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cTrix
cTrix
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Thu Nov 15, 2018 2:45 pm
Here is a nurse having procured a stretcher...
[NEW LOW] NPCs room priority for equal function rooms  367f7af0b17e331759b5c482e05240d8

From the upstairs surgery room.
[NEW LOW] NPCs room priority for equal function rooms  23938ba89dbfa85e576bfe1de487ede7

There are stretchers just down the hall...
Stop telling me this is working as intended.
igor.oxymoron
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Thu Nov 15, 2018 3:39 pm
In general:

- characters are trying to reserve the nearest object that is free/unreserved

- if the nearest obejct is already reseved, they find another one and so on - so if the fridge, you have mentioned, is reserved, character wil find not reserved one - that could be far from him (try to place more than one fridge in common room (2-3))

- regarding the rooms - patients look for the nearest and also the most empty waiting room - maybe because of this, it can look strange when sitting far from the doc office

- stretchers issue - we are already working on some stretcher - related issues so please be patient (but there are many issues that can be explained rationally and can not be treated as bugs). As i have no save game to analyze this situation i can only guess what went wrong.

We really appreciate your feedback - we will definetely consider some changes and poslihing to actual game mechanics - so please be patient.

cTrix
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Thu Nov 15, 2018 4:15 pm
The stretcher in the surgery room was the closest....
if you ignore the ceiling not being walk-through.
igor.oxymoron
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Thu Nov 15, 2018 4:17 pm
cTrix wrote:The stretcher in the surgery room was the closest....
if you ignore the ceiling not being walk-through.

Could you, please, upload here a saved game file, when you notice issue like this? Thanks in advance!
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