AI / pathfinding is cpu intensive and I've played too many RTS's where they skimped on ai/pathfinding but poured all money into graphics / sound and it shows. It makes a poor substitute for a less pretty but more functional rts where units will actually not run into the wall of enemies but instead go where you intended them to.
Mod maker for PC is working on a library (forge) that is a third party addon to a primary app that doesn't have any real need for pathfinding except possibly villagers (joke intended). Everything else is straight on. point a to point b, find a simple path and 'try' to avoid lava. This means he probably has to make everything on his own and thus, reinvent the wheel. Those drones move around so much to give you a sort of realism that I think that's what's causing the issue.
Take utility mobs for instance. The souls don't just follow you, they go on walk about constantly. You need to leash them to follow you. When they do find an enemy, they fight until they're dead. No going back to heal, etc. I'm wishing for things that just don't have an equivalence right now.
I can think of one example sort of. Chocolate quest. In there, the AI attacks you, and when gets damaged, does try to run away and use healing potions, etc... They gang up on you, etc... They also end up in lava alot but in nether, it's all pig zombies so it doesn't matter. They don't just jump off cliffs to their deaths, they take the stairs. Not an exact comparison but still.
In the end, I'd rather have less functionality if the balance is that it's more reliable. Insert more functionality once reliability comes closer to 100%. Eliminate all ctd even if you have to 'catch / try' every error imaginable. In my mind, crashing MC shouldn't ever happen unless you're worried that not doing so would corrupt world, but how many times have ctd's caused corruption in first place? Most languages have error conditionals to catch errors and throw a handled exception or just log the entry. It's the unhandled exceptions that cause most ctd and they are either ticking entity or divide by zero, etc... This to me, is a game breaker, and to a layman's perspective, programmatically fixable but it wasn't.
I would never ever complain to a mod author that they are an idiot for doing these things. Never. Not only is that not my opinion at all, but this thing they do is wonderful and awesome no matter how many bugs there are, etc. I will however avoid said mod if the fun/frustration factor is way off. I'll wait while other people be guinea pigs. It's just not going to be me.
A counter example before people start calling me a bug nazi. Tinkers construct. Sometimes the gui screws up in smeltery and you can't see what's in it. Sometimes the faucets get stuck. the trick of getting liquids in/out is a pita. Do I avoid it? not at all. The tiny tiny amount of frustration of those things is so insignificant in comparison to the cool things the mod adds. The alloying process is interesting and unique without causing too much grinding to do. I think it's fun. The addons, etc... make it even more interesting. Now, with that said, I played crafting paradise and they did have the railcraft hidden blocks enabled so that may have caused this issue, I don't know, but I had a completely lag destroyed world from 2 days worth of playing that ruined me for playing that pack again. I will probably try it again w/o hidden blocks (it's disabled in latest version) but I've never had that issue but it all revolved around the smelteries. The casting basins got stuck and if you pick the basin to replace it down, ctd. each and every time. If this were to happen to me in many packs, I would avoid tinkers. again, I think it's the hidden blocks from rc. Takes more than one time to be suspicious.
