I am currently developing collision prediction support to use for upcoming game ( [Dev. blog] Accelerated: Linear Prediction Collision Detection ).
First of all what is collision prediction and why is it useful?
- There are cases where one would want to know beforehand which objects
would collide and when. - This can be very helpful to make more intelligent AI characters
- This can be used to reduce lag for client/server apps as collision can be reported from server to client before it actually happens
- In certain cases, it may perform faster than traditional collision detection(reason: computations are not done at every frame)
After searching the internet I have not found any existing implementation. Thus, it is safe to assume, jme3 would be one of the first, if not, the first engine to support this feature.
To give an example where one would use this. Imagine a sword fighting game, where player sword can collide with ai character’s enemy sword. With collision prediction, the ai character will know wheter it will be hit or wheter it will sucessfully block before the event happened. Thus it can try to dodge or block with its sword. In other words, this information is very helpful for making a strong ai opponent.
I believe this is a creative and innovative idea. How do you guys think it goes with the GSoC? I believe Google likes new ideas.