I don't know how "smart" it is by your definition but for an AI getting stuck by npc, wall or anything is still pretty dumb to me, lol, unless the path is one way and totally blocked. Did you mention your own AI or MV default one? Seems like I'm getting confused between mouse clicking's path finding and follower's.
I think you've misunderstood me; I
choose to have stupid AI and
not smart AI. The reason is because smart AI was "too smart" and ended up being distracting and confusing to witness when it activated.
So for followers, if a door closed that trapped the follower at the back, with the current stupid AI the follower would just walk into the wall and you'd leave them behind (they'll teleport and catch up later). When I had complex smart AI with path-finding as soon as the follower would get trapped, they'd turn around and walk in the other direction because they found a "better" path, thing is the player would be walking along in one direction, then suddenly their party member is forced to walk in the other direction; the player will notice this because the follower no-longer looks like it is following, it looks like it has gained intelligence and has wandered off. It's distracting for the player to witness and it is a surprise that could threaten the player's sense of control over their party members; it is purely a game design issue related to the player psychology (expectation management).
I also encountered this weird game design issue when it came to mouse-input, where clicking on the other side of the wall may surprise the player when their character walks in the
opposite direction to the wall they just clicked at because their AI was smart enough to find that better route; however the player wanted to go "right", not "left", so this isn't great feedback. I know default MV has some path-finding, however this is grid-based (and is incompatible, as a result) and the AI feels better for a grid-based world due to the touch-points not being very accurate to begin with. Default MV mouse-movement feels more like a "suggestion" that the AI needs to resolve; For Altimit Movement, the mouse-movement (and touch) is more tactile as the response is instant and the player has far more direct-control, so tapping feels less like a "suggestion" and more like a "command", for the AI to walk in the opposite direction feels like it violated that command and like the game is telling the player that the "AI knows best", which is a #1 no-no in game design.
I understand that people would still like to have smarter AI - and I've got loads of nice code already written for this - so it would likely become and extension Plugin. The extension Plugin will demonstrate these game design issues that I encountered.
For the case of conflicting Plugins; no Plugin is at fault. I think I know why the foot-steps freak out; for Altimit Movement 1 step can be as small as 1 pixel (sometimes even smaller!) so when the player moves across 1-tile, there can be up-to-and-beyond 48 individual steps, which would cause foot-step Plugins based on player-steps to activate up-to-and-beyond 48 times each tile.
I absolutely do not want to do "Plugin-specific compatibility patches", I learned the hard way with my event-touch-triggers Plugin that Plugin-specific compatibility is insane to manage and will eventually be the death of a Plugin. I think the best thing to do is find a way that makes both Plugins work nicely, without having to "detect" if either Plugin is installed. This can be done in either Alimit Movement or Foot Step Sound.
What I think I'll do is remake some select Plugins to be compatible with both Altimit Movement and vanilla MV. Right now I'm thinking of remaking Galv's character animations Plugin because there's an incompatibility with that right now (and it has features I wanted to add to Altimit Movement anyway, might as well make it an extension Plugin).
