I had the same thing happen with my (non-mine) dungeon pieces and in my hospital for the adventure I just released. I'm guessing that maybe there's no "Z" axis and that when you place a ceiling or something above a character the game interprets it as being on the same "level" as the ground? No ida on this one.

Strangely enough, most of the creatures in the casino that I built in the same idiotic way as the hospital (which should just count as one big fat bounding box) function just as I want them to.

Thanks for starting this thread. This is totally accurate as can be seen by making a test arena and fiddling with it. As long as the arena floor is technically the top of the building and the bounding box, then there's no problem. But if you build an arena with even one worthless doodad (e.g. a flag) then the bounding box makes the AI completely unaware regardless of attitude and awareness settings, due to the actor being technically 'inside' the bounding box.

A creature in a bounding box is totally blind, even to other creatures in the box.

I'm pretty sure this does happen with pathing too, when other actors who are in your 'crew' or set to follow your captain, being inside the bounding box can cause them to stop following your captain.

Yes, very good topic. Has me thinking.

Luckily I don't have anything planned soon that will use huge interiors or should have any problems with buildings. However when I start my adaption of Shining Soul II.....ugh, it's gonna be hard enough without having to worry about the dungeons.

IMPORTANT UPDATE
It appears that gates are transparent.
The bounding box of a gate and of disguised gates do NOT block line of sight. This means that by replacing the building with a disguised gate that uses that building, most of the problems will be solved.
1. NPCS can see (awareness tests and commands that depend on awareness work.
2. NPCs can transition onto and off of these disguised gates.
There are some problems if you move a disguised gate to far off the ground. It isn't a visiblity problem, but appears to be pathing issue. My guess is the the AI uses the ground geometry to figure out paths.

WOAH! this is very useful information, Thanks DVDMaster!

DVDMaster wrote:IMPORTANT UPDATE
It appears that gates are transparent.
The bounding box of a gate and of disguised gates do NOT block line of sight. This means that by replacing the building with a disguised gate that uses that building, most of the problems will be solved.
1. NPCS can see (awareness tests and commands that depend on awareness work.
2. NPCs can transition onto and off of these disguised gates.
There are some problems if you move a disguised gate to far off the ground. It isn't a visiblity problem, but appears to be pathing issue. My guess is the the AI uses the ground geometry to figure out paths.

Nice! Testing this discovery out.

Video of my test results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgXp8z1OwMs

An awareness test in Spore using two buildings. The first room was made as a single floor/wall unit in the Building Editor. The second room is a gate disguised as the first room. The video demonstrates that creatures in the gate room do in fact recognize--and attack--each other as they should while the ones in the first room are blind to each other's presence. The gate room creatures even manage to go out a door and onto ground! The obvious downsides: The textures for the walls of the disguised gate never "pop", instead looking muddy. Also, the chettesus (cheetah spider) charged through a wall when it REALLY wanted its prey.

Ah..nice I was wondering about this after learning that you can interact through a closed invisible gate. Transitioning too eh? cool.

Well This makes things interesting in the level building side of things. Now we will need to use a combination of disguised full buildings with normal parts to help control awareness.

What annoys me is that this had to be tested by the community when maxis could have simply mentioned this in a faq or something. Instead all they do is pop in and say "well sweeetie, aren't you cute and clever here is a pat on the head for getting it right". I guess they assumed that their customers heads would implode if anything technical was mentioned by them about the editor.

Nihthasu7 wrote:Video of my test results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgXp8z1OwMs

An awareness test in Spore using two buildings. The first room was made as a single floor/wall unit in the Building Editor. The second room is a gate disguised as the first room. The video demonstrates that creatures in the gate room do in fact recognize--and attack--each other as they should while the ones in the first room are blind to each other's presence. The gate room creatures even manage to go out a door and onto ground! The obvious downsides: The textures for the walls of the disguised gate never "pop", instead looking muddy. Also, the chettesus (cheetah spider) charged through a wall when it REALLY wanted its prey.

Okay folks, I've conducted more tests. I deconstructed the room and reassembled the components separately in the adventure editor. Seven pieces total with walls, floor, door overhang, ceiling, pillar and teleport pad. I sic'd the creatures on each other and it worked . . . sort of. They would go blind whenever one of them got close to a wall or in a corner, so I removed the corner pillars. I also converted the telepad into a disguised gate so the creature wouldn't get tripped up on it. Their performance improved, but they still went blind when they wandered near a wall. I then realized that the walls in question had detailing on them.
Conclusion: use absolutely flat walls with no extraneous details hanging off of them. Having said that, we all know you can't save a building in the Building Editor unless you use at least 3 parts, so you can either duplicate the part twice, shrink the clones and nest them in the original part, or you can try detailing the wall as long as the details are nearly flush with the wall's surface. Big wall details extend the BBB (bounding box blindness) well beyond the wall itself.
So Grimbot, your second idea for the dungeon planet is closest, except your walls can't have built-in pillars. They must be separate units. Also use disguised gates for your stalactites so your creatures can see through them and if need be, charge through them. I would also suggest building rooms you know are going to have a lot of target interactions in a way the confines the action away from the walls or give your creatures a minimum wandering area in the room. In a factory brawl, for instance, you could have the fight area confined by railings so the battle doesn't end with everyone against the walls with question marks over their heads.
I'll create vids of my results.


In summary: seperate walls, floors, ceilings; walls should be modular and as flat as possible, including any details; convert furnishings and details into disguised gates if you don't mind the texture drop.

Remeber, that the bounding box is the box that encloses all the details of the building. So when you have thin walls with larger diameter pillars, the width of the bounding box expands to include the thinkness of the pillars. (Just like the height grew to enclose objects put on top of flooring.)

The problem is that the collision surfaces are not the same as the awareness bounding box. When you have think pillars and thin walls, a character can enter the bounding box (because he is only stopped by the collsion surface) where he gets stuck in the bounding box's awareness trap.

This suggests several solutions:
- If you use columns as part of the wall, don't have them extend very far from the wall. So square columns that aren't much thinker than the wall would work better than thick round columns.
- Adding a thick footing to the wall, should give a collision surface much closer to the awareness blocking volume so that the NPCs can't get stuck.
- Place invisible gates in front of the walls to keep out NPCs (and the captain). This is really only useful for really detailed walls that you want to keep for decoration.
- Keep this in mind when creating your adventure. If you aren't having groups attack each other, you only have NPCs who attacking the captain, then it one is less likely to have problems. Yes, the captain might try to exploit this -- but if he does, he risks getting stuck in the wall. (that issue needs to be another thread).

But the best solution might be to:
Build the walls and columns as separate pieces
This is probably easiest to implement and only costs 2 slots on the building pallet.

I like the whole thick running board idea. Perfect for castles and dungeons. In the case of factories, one could use piping or cables.

The new update about disguised gates is tremendously helpful, DVD... seriously. Definitely going to try that out when I get my main computer up and running again.

This brought me a lot of light!

Great post, good research!

You're like... the Sporean Newton, with all those theories and drawings with stickman and numbers! lol

JK, great information there

I'll just add a tip: for complexity purposes, if you're going to make a building with NO npcs, or only stopped npcs (like a guard, for example) you can make a full building

But everyone knows that, I guess.
Whatever.
4:31 AM here. I'm sleepy. Bye.

Here's that test adventure.

http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=usr-Nihthasu7|2263174575%3Asast-500397273613

Also I put our theories into action by releasing a Director's Cut of my last adventure, Optorc. Now the climax is climactic. Check out both the original and the DC versions to see the difference. And remember to back out of the room during the countdown to really appreciate the change.
I broke down the room into three(!) pieces: wall, door, window. I also took the pylons off of the ceiling, eliminating that blind spot. As for the disguised gate floor in the room, it only actually appears in the adventure during the goal it's needed for. Otherwise more conventional flooring--without that sinking feeling--is featured. Also since the floor doesn't touch the walls--play it to find out why--I didn't have to worry about any BBB nonsense from the built-in wall monitors.

By the way, a disguised gate floor is MANDATORY in your modular interior. Yes, feet sink into the floor and yes, you can see the ground cover poking through, but it's the only floor that consistently lets the creatures do what they're supposed to do. DGing the floor made all the difference.