🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!

Back to Artificial Intelligence

Group Movement...

ragonastick · 2001-09-21T04:40:15

I''m currently rewriting my pathfinding module of my RTS for the third time, and basically, I''m wondering what ideas you have for setting up good looking group movement. To give you a few details, the maps will not necessarily be full of wide open spaces, which seems to put things in a bit of a bottleneck. I don''t need to have formations, so that is not something to worry about. My main problem is that I''m not sure how much of the path to work out when the user gives the order, since by the time a unit gets to another location, the map will probably have changed (with units moving about). My first attempt was just your standard A* algo, and whenever it got to an obstacle which was not supposed to be there, then the entire path was recalculated. This had a few problems, I didn''t like the short pause when the new path was found, and also because it didn''t adapt to the environment unless it was absolutely necessary, then it would dodge non-existant objects which were there when the path was calculated. Second attempt, I decided to use A* again for the main path and ignore any dynamic obstacles (such as units), but every move, instead of following that path, I would look ahead 5 or so moves ahead based on the original search, and then make the first of those moves. This was better, but slow, and sometimes ended up with a situation where looking ahead 5 moves would not find a path, which also led to a nasty pause. But bigger problems came when dynamic obstacles which were ignored when calculating the master plan path were blocking the path and they didn''t actually move, or they did move, but they still blocked the path, so the path found would be void. I figure that I am probably going to have to live with having pauses and stuff as the map changes since it is a fairly tricky thing to do but... any ideas? The reason I title this Group Movement is because one of the main collisions I was having was having was two units both heading for the same location and trying to take very similar paths.... and also, because there are lots of pathfinding threads right now... and this one is different For the record, I have also read the excellent articles at Gamasutra about how this was handled in Age of Kings... they were a good read, and I''ve learnt a lot.. the main differences I have to their problem is that my terrain will be a lot more maze-like, no need for formations and also the way things are designed, collisions can never happen in my game: if two units end up on the same square, one will disappear, which means that my pathfinding has to work coordinating the movement through squares rather than telling the units to move from point A to B and then resolving collisions as they happen. Sorry for the verbosity in describing my qualm.... all my questions seem to turn out this way Trying is the first step towards failure.

Artificial Intelligence Programming

Started by ragonastick September 19, 2001 06:53 AM

9 comments, last by ragonastick 22 years, 9 months ago

morfe

100

September 21, 2001 04:40 AM

How about a beacon which sends a message to units within a certain radius to say "this is a quicker way"?

This way, if, say, a wall is destroyed allowing a way through, a beacon is "planted" at the location and sends a message to the units nearby to tell them they need to check their path to see if it could be bettered upon.

This of course assumes your units, or at least their group mind, has some sort of message handling.

"NPCs will be inherited from the basic Entity class. They will be fully independent, and carry out their own lives oblivious to the world around them ... that is, until you set them on fire ..." -- Merrick

🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Group Movement...

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Group Movement...

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Reticulating splines