And Moved ;)

Moved the blog to http://www.mrjre.nl

Some nice new videos on Path Planning

So, recently there have been a couple of new videos that illustrate ‘new’ techniques in path planning and especially crowd simulation for games. The first is on so called flow fields in supreme commander. Although it is a really nice new way of doing things, especially in the example where large units move to a group of smaller ones the behavior to my opinion is still unnatural as small units literally get pushed out of the way:

And the second is on path planning in the upcoming Starcraft 2, which I don’t really know much about, but it looks as if they combine local force methods with A*. It looks cool but again the behavior of the zerglings sometimes is a bit unnatural still, some odd patterns can be seen when the units are packed together:

‘New’ Blogpost :p

In light of my thesis project, I said to 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 still intend to do so . 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 am 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…