I understand that the main thrust of the discussion here is about a general agent framework, but I just wanted to follow up on the porting (and possible further development) of OpenSteer, and I think this is the best place to do so.
@sevarac said: @shogaThe nice thing with having steering implemented as agent behaviours is that we can easily try, test and replace or evolve them.
I’m sorry if this is a silly question (I’m still learning about software engineering practices) but isn’t the downside of this approach that the steering library would be coupled with the agent system? I was thinking that it would be nice to have a steering library that could be used with the AI engine, but could also be used on its own. It seems that many games could benefit from steering behaviours but wouldn’t need fully-fledged AI. (Say a fast-paced top-down shooter in which the enemies only have one goal - attack - and no complex decisions to make).
I also wanted to take the opportunity to mention @Momoko_Fan and @Sploreg - I’ve been exploring the jME codebase and community, and it seems that you guys might be in a good position to give some additional advice on how best to either add additional steering behaviours to jME or create and integrate a java steering library.
I’ve also discussed this with my course director at university, and we’ve agreed that I can work on steering behaviours for my MSc too. This means that I can hopefully contribute something in this area to jME long-term, whether the GSoC proposal is successful or not.