Advanced Avoidance

[freepboot]

Do we know what advanced avoidance does in the movement tab of race forms? Someone speculated on another forum that it wasn't used in skyrim (some vestigial value from earlier games or fallout), but I don't know about that; humanoid races like nords or khajiit are advanced avoidance-enabled, creatures like goats, etc. aren't (interestingly enough bretons' advanced avoidance is disabled by default, I guess they're navigationally challenged).

Note: In the goatrace picture, I increased the angular tolerance (to 20 from 5) but didn't change any other values.

[freepboot]

Did some testing and found out it has very little or even nothing to do with pathing around havok-enabled objects in the world: 

Identical results were yielded from disabling advanced avoidance.

[freepboot]

Did some additional testing on trolls (who are AA-enabled by default), and changed their combat style mults a little to see if advanced avoidance has something to do with 'intelligent' tactics. By intelligent tactics I mean things like strafing, dodging arrows, etc. 

In either case, enabled or disabled, the trolls' tactics were unaffected. The troll dodged arrows *very slightly* less of the time when AA was disabled, but that could just be a trick of the imagination.

[freepboot]

Currently testing with rabbit move data (unrelated reasons), and I've noticed some peculiarities when enabling AA, the AI seems to repath more often. 

edit: The thing of it is, even if the pathing is marginally smarter, it may ultimately still be to the AIs detriment. The additional time it takes to repath is translating to a few more hits landed from opponents. It may be more optimal to disable AA for faster (albeit dumber) pathing 

Edited June 27, 2022 by freepboot

[freepboot]

Testing more, disabled all forms of movement on the horker except swimming which immobilizes half the horkers I tested on land (though not all of them). For some reason when AA is enabled, more of them move on land in this scenario than when AA is disabled. Make of that what you will, I don't know