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[Crandal]

When a flying, or waterbreathing race is played, a bug with dangerous terrain refuses to let them path properly into the air or underwater.  Is there any reason these remain bugged?  I mean, it doesn't seem too problematic to add a check for flight ability or water breathing to dangerous terrain, but if that's not the only problem with it, what is?

[LordZorintrhox]

Pathing is a pain in the butt to code, believe me.  Most solutions are written given a set of assumptions about the legal ways things can move in the simulated (or in the case of robotics, real) environment.  DF's pathing and the simulation system in general was probably originally written with the assumption that movement happens in two dimensions .  That means that it probably thinks about the 2D Moore neighborhood (the eight tiles around any given tile) from a particular tile than it does the up and down directions.  Compound that with how "dangerous terrain" is determined, and you have a mess.

So, yeah, the reason is that it is probably a bit of a kludgey mess inside the pathfinder and that is why it remains bugged.  I imagine Today will have to fix it when he gets to a pathfinding rewrite so it can take advantage of all 26 directions you can travel from a tile, which means major tricks and hacks will have to be employed.