Originally posted by kuaggie
Bort needs to take a look at the pursuit algorithm as it looks like the defenders determine an angle of attack (or spot to attack to based on the player's speed) which, once it has been determined. has a 1:1 modification of the x-axis whenever the ball-carrier's x-axis changes. That doesn't work correctly in this instance.
No, I don't think that's how it works. What happens is that the Defender(D) is mapping out an intercept course, and as the ball carrier changes his path from moving right to moving left, D is seeing a huge swing in intercept point, as he's not going to catch him anytime soon.
On top of that, I think vision checks are used to introduce errors in intercept point, and when the intercept point is very far away, small vision mistakes can add up to a BIG miscalculation in attack angle. If that's true, then it might be an improvement to change the vision checks to adjust the angle of the turn by small amounts rather than move the intercept point, but that doesn't work as well for things like attempting to intercept/deflect a pass, I think.
I'm not *overly* worried about it for the MLB and the CB, because in this case the TE is going faster than they are and they just can't catch him. Perhaps better logic could be put into place for pursuit from behind when the defender won't catch the ball carrier before the endzone - something like just moving directly for the ball carrier might look better - but that's mostly just going to try to make it look smoother. In fact, all the pursuit here is slower than the TE, so we're probably in "pursuit code does odd things when you won't catch the ball carrier" type of bug, but really bad movement behavior is still a bug, I think, and should be improved, even if it won't impact the result of the play.
