Major Beepsky and Securitrons don't patrol

[Zamujasa]

Something recently broke Beepsky -- he no longer automatically starts patrolling at the start of a round, instead staying cooped up in his house.

Securitrons also refuse to patrol or move unless they see someone set to arrest, in which case they'll chase, but then stop dead if that person goes away.

The AI PDA doesn't seem able to kick them into gear, either; summoning doesn't work, and choosing to start patrolling doesn't work either.

[Clean Your Teeth]

I think this might be related; just had a round where the MULE was failing to find a route to any location (on Cog1) though it should have been able to
(At least it was constantly giving a sighing buzz regardless of where I tried to send it, which I think means its pathfinding failed?)

[Vengarr]

MULES were busted prior to the issue with the Beepskies. But yes, they're totally busted. They don't work on any of the maps I've tried.

[aft2001]

MULEs SOMETIMES work. Sometimes. They seem to be able to find their way to some areas but grump at other areas, even if it just came from said area.

Looks like path-finding is broken in general. On a related note, how functional is the GPS command? If that is perfectly fine, then the coders could probably just use that for bot pathfinding, and if not, then that's just more stuff that the coders can analyze to see why the heck things are borked.

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After a quick search of the 2016 public release, a comment in the parent code for bots seems to indicate that the bots use A* pathfinding. Here's the wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

I'm really just spitballing ideas because I can, and I can't view any error logs for the bots failing to pathfind, so yeah, heck. But, maybe it's possible that the process for finding a path takes too long, so it gets shut down before it can actually reach its goal. This would align with some observations that I saw whilst trying to get the MULE to work.

On Cog1, I had sent it from QM to Research, and it got there successfully. However, when it tried to return home, it grumped. I then tried sending it to Engineering - no dice. But, when I told it to go to Medbay, bang, it worked. Note Cog1's shape - it's a big C, essentially. Perhaps the A* algorithm tried searching for its destination - QM/Engineering - both East and North of Research - both of which are pretty long hallways with a lot of branching rooms. However, Research is right next to Medbay so it wouldn't have to search very far; QM is at the very end of the hallway on Cog1, so there's only 1 way that the MULE can search.

There are probably ways to optimize the pathfinding here, if that is actually the case. I'm not too sure as to how it could be optimized, though, so maybe just extending the time that the algorithm can search for its destination would suffice?

[Lost Generation]

Whatever caused this is also affecting guardbuddies if you give them the patrol script. I haven't seen Harner or Murray go on break since this started, either.

[Zamujasa]

I've seen Harner try to go on break but he gives up without moving.

[aft2001]

Were there any recent changes to either bots or the pathfinding code that may have broken something? Probably worth asking the coders about this.

Though, bot pathfinding has been broken or funky for quite some time, but only now has it appeared to fuck with the ability for the Buddies and Securitrons to function (though I've seen them occasionally patrolling, oddly enough)

[mbc]

they seem to be working now, although none of us went out of our way to fix it. if no further reports show up we can move this to Resolved

[mbc]

looked at this bug again and they *werent* working, but spent some time working on its and its actually fixed now