Monday, January 6, 2014

Daedalus : group pathfinding and FOV


Today 2 new demos made with Daedalus, showing in action 2 new components: group pathfinding and field of view.

The group pathfinding has many interesting features:
- it can manage any number of entities
- it can manage any size of entities
- generated paths are automatically sampled in order to synchronise the entities and avoid collision between them


We could just reproach the single common path the entities use. Indeed, if the entities have different sizes, it could be legitimate to expect them to reach the goals by different optimized paths and keep synchronisation to avoid collision. But in fact, this behavior is the subject of a new component coming soon, more focused on synchronisation for entities having completely different start and goal positions.


Then the field of view, while looking not so impressive, is a very important component to give awareness to AI entities, allowing them to detect cleverly the other entities. The features are:
- radius, opening angle, position and direction as dynamic properties
- the FOV is broken by constrained edges (other entities can hide behind walls)
- it manages non-null size entites



In the details, the FOV implementation is simply an accurate clipping system. So it can really manages the visibility of an entity through very complex situation with partially overlapping walls.


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