Experimenting with pathfinding

[Robert]

Out of curiousity was the top shower the one that was built first? I am assuming it is and would explain why they run to the toilets in the holding cell .

[Daixiwen]

Yes the top shower room was the first one I built.

[frasercarter]

Very helpful post Daix. I wish I would have taken a screen shot but I have seen so many prisoners crowded around the staff-only door to my kitchen that the regular staff couldn't get close enough to the door to trigger it to open so it created a deadlock. There were about 7 prisoners trying to get in and another two coming out. Three janitors couldn't get past the 7 prisoners so the situation just remained deadlocked until the next chow time.

lol i have had this happen to me aswell... quite funny to see, i had to buy another guard on the other side of the door, to get them to pass through.

[frasercarter]

I found it! The 5 ones that rushed to the top shower had a high need for hygiene, while the other 4 didn't.
I edited my savefile again and removed all the needs for hygiene, forced them to shower again, and voilà!!!




I don't know if we can generalize to other needs, but at least in the case of hygiene and showers, the pathfinding only works correctly when the prisoner doesn't actually need to shower. In that case he just goes to the shower room with the shortest path. When he actually needs to shower, it seems to be a different algorithm that is used, leading to a non optimal path. Looks like a bug...

this is a good find, this needs to be made into its own separate topic, with the problem and the discovery, and possible solution.!

[Andersen]

I don't know if this is interesting, but today I demolished a wall of my prison (11x1 opening), and either the guards or prisoners would use it. They rather walked all the way around the prison to get out. I did not try to add a door as I was just extending the prison.
It was probably like this for an ingame day as I didn't have enough cash to build it as soon as I expected.
The builders used it as normal

[Daixiwen]

I have added a note and save files to bug 32 explaining my findings.
You can download the zip files to see what I talk about, I think it reproduces the bug clearly! Please support the bug!
I hope Mangobreeder doesn't mind my hijacking his bug report but I felt it was better to put it there than to open a new bug.