Ranger Patrol Fix

Description

Ever been irritated that Rangers seem to just never go on their patrols because they “Cannot find route to destination”, even when the post is right in front of them and you've moved the dang thing fifty times already? It was ruining the entire experience of this game for me, and it made me sad nobody (Frontier) was trying to fix it. So here's a fix. Does it make JWE2 as good as JWE1? No, but it does make enjoying the better animal behaviours this game has to offer much easier since now you don't have to fight your employees all the time.

I saw a lot of discussion about this bug being related to pathfinding behaviour on the part of the Ranger vehicles, but I had my doubts. The MVU vehicles rely on the same Ranger Posts to do their patrols and have no problem, and I couldn't think of why Frontier would have two different pathfinding algorithms to do effectively the same job. I don't know anything about modding this game, so I downloaded Cobra Tools and handed a bunch of .lua files to CGPT to compare MVU and Ranger behaviour, and sure enough, it found something that, out of all the vehicles in this game, only the Ranger vehicle does. CGPT helped me to create this mod which bypasses that completely unnecessary behaviour (see below), and now the Rangers work as intended.

If using AI to accomplish this task offends you, sorry. I need my game to function properly, and it's a good tool to accomplish that. I'm not here to start a fight.

This has been tested on a Windows 11 PC and SteamDeck, and produces consistent results. If you run into issues, feel free to let me know, but I am not an experienced modder, so there's no guarantee I will be able to help.

Installation instructions

Unzip RangerPatrolFix-1. 0.zip into your ovldata folder. Play game.

Your file structure should look something like this:

└── RangerPatrolFix

├── Manifest.xml

├── Main.ovl

└── README.mdNo ACSEDebug installation or console commands are required.

Compatibility

This mod changes only components.taskautomator._VisitPost at runtime through ACSE. Mods that also replace or modify that exact function may conflict.

Main features

In the vanilla game, Ranger vehicles, unlike Helicopters and MVU vehicles—or dinosaurs for that matter—perform a sort of weird "pre-journey route check" to see if it is possible to reach Ranger Posts to which they are assigned as part of a patrol. They use raw repair point location data to determine where the post is. I'm not certain where the game believes these repair points for the Ranger Posts are, but it would seem they are probably inside some sort of geometry, probably inside the ground or within the model of the Ranger Post itself. Because this exact point is inside some sort of collision, the route check almost always reports "False" and therefore the Rangers report they cannot find a route to the destination, and never leave to perform their patrol. MVU vehicles and Capture Team helicopters do not perform this route check, and therefore do not use the raw repair point location data. What they do—and what other Ranger vehicle behaviour direct the Rangers to do—is instead look at the location indicated and then plot a route to the nearest point within 4 metres of that location to which they can travel, then immediately execute that route.

This mod bypasses that route check for the Ranger vehicles perform patrols connected to Ranger Posts, thus allowing the Rangers to behave like the other pathfinding actors in the game, and how they themselves are intended to function. When you bypass the route check, the rest of the programmed behaviour by Frontier takes over, and everything works.

Requirements

You will need ACSE to run this mod. This was developed and tested with ACSE 0. 723.

Thanks to OpenNaja for providing Cobra Tools, the ACSE team for, well, ACSE, and Frontier for the game.