@atomix I agree that terrain (floor) should be the part of AI. It is necessary for good spatial reasoning. I started the jNavigation project for use of Recast Navigation for the purpose of MonkeyBrains, but I never finished it. I will probably start it all over again, as the Recast Navigation was updated with new methods of creating navmeshes. The best possible way for representing terrain is with polygons, and Recast works well with them, but the problem is that with that kind of terrain representation are implementing basic senses. How did you implemented terrain reasoning and what are your thoughts of it?
@Pesegato I was thinking about your posts, I think there was misunderstanding what does inventory do. It is possible that the name was misleading. I think of Inventory class not as storage that agent has, but some things that agent can do periodically. I think I can better explain this with few examples.
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In FPS, agents have gun, weapon, bombs. I think it is wrong extend Agent class and possibly override something that shouldn’t be overridden in framework and I think that from big picture, agent entity and weapon entity can exist separately and logic of them working together shouldn’t be in agent class, but in behaviors. So the idea of extending agent in direction of weapons should be in use of Inventory interface and making basic behaviors that will go well with them. Example of that in MonkeyBrains is SimpleAttackBehavior and Inventory class.
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Inventory will never have the status of class, because the storage of weapons differ from game to game. It maybe list, array or matrix. It is up to programmer to define how to store items.
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Inventory is embedded into agent class and it will be given tpf-s. This will enable to reduce cooldown everything what is added that should have cooldown in inventory. I remind you that weapons have cooldown and are unable to use, until the cooldown is over. Without this programmer will have extend the agent and override the appropriate methods to reduce cooldown.
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Steering behaviors are influenced by the mass of agent. Mass depends of agent’s mass and mass of his inventory. Also embedded into agent. If you don’t want to include mass of inventory just return zero for appropriate method.
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I am aware that some agents don’t use weapons, so this problem is solved inside of agent class. If you don’t use inventory, it will not change anything.
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Super powers, magic, skills should be stored into inventory, as they can be used periodically. They will not have mass. But inventory is used for this kind of stuff. I think MagicInventory for magic stuff is god extension for Inventory, as it can include stuff like mana, and with Java 1.8, we can make additional logic inside of these inventories…
I think I explained my point of view nicely. What do you say @Pesegato should we return Inventory and possibly rename it if the name was misleading?