So it’s been quite some time since I last blogged, a lot of stuff happened since, so it’s about time I’d blog again. The experimentation project in the end didn’t turn out to go very well in the end. Problems within the team and lack of motivation caused us to get behind schedule and deliver a game which wasn’t really remotely finished (at least, to my standards) but I guess my expectations we’re too high to begin with. Nevertheless I did finish it to uni expectations, and the only thing left to do is write a document on how best to incorporate Ogre3D within a game (engine). I finished some courses as well luckily; I did a course on Path Planning and Crowd Simulation which was really cool, and I retried for Motion and Manipulation, which is essentially a robotics course mostly related to planning paths for robots that have a certain degree of freedom, forward kinematics for robot arms (and thus also skeletons in games), high level collision detection and the grasping of objects and such. The course has a lot of things in common with other courses like path planning, but also computational geometry and virtual worlds which itself is mostly about physics and network related aspects of virtual environments. Having finished that course which was actually my last one, I am now preparing to begin my Thesis project

In light of my thesis project therefore, I will try to blog more and focus a bit more on the subject of my research, which is about path planning for characters in virtual worlds, specifically related to constructing paths in complex 3D environments (environments which have tunnels, bridges and such). I’m not yet sure on where to begin, but I will make it thorough and worth reading for one I’ll cover A* of course, one of the most famous of path finding algorithms, but I will also move on to other things, like navigation graphs and navigation meshes, and also some lesser known methods such as the corridor map method which is being developed at Utrecht University (and where I will be working on to do path planning in 3D environments). I might also consider several methods to simulate crowds as well, since games tend to get larger and larger and therefore whole cities are being populated with characters which move through the city (for example in the Assassins Creed series and the Grand Theft Auto series). To be continued…