Tonight at 9PM GMT-5, I’ll be trying to add simple collision avoidance to the steering system I developed over the past week. This will help the birds/gaefen steer away from obstacles in their path rather than running straight into them.
This has an added benefit of when there are a herd of gaefen then hopefully we relieve the physics engine of some difficult to resolve clustering. Right now, if 100 birds are all trying to go to the same spot then the ones closest to the obstacle tend to get physics jitter from the ‘pressure’ (similar to stacking 100 boxes)… but if the birds are prewired not to walk into obstacles then this won’t happen.
I’ll post back with a link when I’ve actually created the scheduled live stream.
I’ve added chapter markers for those who like to skip around. Preview:
0:00 Introduction
0:50 What I added in the past week
5:50 Steering systems
8:40 “Wander” steering primitive
10:30 Probes for collision avoidance
22:35 Implementing probe-based steering
25:38 Structure of agent update() method
30:20 Probe logic
40:30 Aside: plans for weapons/tools/ranged weapons
45:27 Dot product to steering
54:15 Trying to implement basic ‘blocked’ behavior
1:07:05 Debugging the probe a little
1:13:25 Will there be other animals?
1:16:25 Outro
Also, I watch the video at 2x speed to find the places to put chapter markers… and personally I find it entirely watchable that way, though I did already know what I was going to say. It could be another good way to skip around.
