Update

Hello kind reader,

I’m really busy with WPF at the moment. I have found the book from Teach Yourself series pretty helpful for the most part.  At least it was with the more basic stuff, but maybe around lesson 16 it started to show that as the subjects discussed go a bit deeper a one hour lesson is just not enough to discuss them in a satisfying manner. It’s not really the writer’s fault I guess, they did a pretty good job but as someone said: “The .NET is truly vast and infinite.”

I’m also working on reviving my C++, since it’s really rusty. I wanted to do it anyway but it will be useful for SimpleSteer as well since I will be able to read and understand C++ steering implementations much better.

So I will finnish the rewrite I started maybe this weekend. From there the next update will probably take a long time, but I will be trying to make a steering pipeline thing since in the demos it seems to work really very well. The other thing I need to learn more about is RVO. RVO stands for relative velocity obstacle (I think) and that’s currently all I know. It has something to do with collision avoidance with dynamic obstacles but I don’t even know if it’s just a fancy name for the same algorithm I use.

Anyway here is a contact manager WPF application. It’s one of the examples in the book. If anyone tries it if it works I’d appreciate it.  download link

Godspeed!

It’s been a while

Hi dear reader,

how are you? I don’t know who you might be, but I hope you are really doing amazing.

Although I did work a bit on games I have been busy with general programming stuff. Mostly .NET. I’m learning WPF and ASP.NET. It’s pretty cool technology actually, something that might shock the M$ haters.

Unfortunately the biggest problem with WPF is that is only available for Win OS. I have been looking around for similar technology that is cross-platform and maybe it’s Qt, but I’m not sure. The thing I like about WPF the most is that the layout stuff is done in XAML. Layout should always be done in some declarative markup language imo, it’s so much easier. The other benefit is the clear separation of UI and the actual program.

Stealth Game demo

Hello there!

I have been working on multiple demos lately. Today I uploaded the latest demo of my stealth game, called Stealth Game for now. It’s a simple scene with a couple of AI agents moving around between set checkpoints.

You can see the demo here.

SimpleSteer error fix #1

Hello there!

A user reported an error to me that pretty much rendered the SphericalAvoidance and Separation behaviours useless. I fixed it and all the download links have been updated. Thank you very much for your help, Dan.

The problem was that the function the SteeringSensor was trying to call was still in the Separation and SphericalAvoidance classes from an earlier version, when they were separate script components of the agent. I reorganized things so that they are part of the AIMotor now. The AIMotor registers the obstacles and stores them in the avoidanceObstacles and separationObstacles arrays and passes them to the behaviours.

I apologize to anyone who tried SimpleSteer and had to face such a blatant error. It’s not a commercial product, but such things are very annoying since you can waste your time on something that just doesn’t work. Please, if you find any problems report them to me! I would really like to supply a useable solution for AI steering even if it’s not a professional one.

Bye!

SimpleSteer version 0.6 released

I released SimpleSteer yesterday. It’s version number should probably be closer to 1.0, but I’ll stick with it for now. The code is fairly well commented imo. It also has the first piece of documentation and an example project released. I’ll be updating these as soon as possible, but it’s probably enough to get started. I hope some people will give it a try and that it will be improved by their feedback. I’m kind of proud of it.

Have a nice day!