Hmm, the title of this post sounds like I’m quoting the ‘Bob the Builder’ theme song…
Two weeks ago tomorrow, my programming classmates and I had our 2nd AIE assignment due. As I mentioned in my previous post, ‘The Stage is Set’, it was on Artificial Intelligence.
The demo ‘game of tag’ simulation the screenshot in that post was from, was completed a day or two after the post. There were still two demo programs to complete by the end of that week. We knew that it was completely inhuman to have both a new ‘game of tag’ simulation (running a behaviour tree as the agent’s brain, instead of the simple state machine) AND a 3D level with navigation mesh generation and A-Star path-finding working and ready to submit by that Friday.
Out of 13 programmers in the course, 9 banded together in a two-team effort to complete the assignment. It was remarkable, something I don’t think our teacher, or the AIE itself for that matter, had ever seen before. 9 students admitting they’d be screwed with getting the assignment in on time individually, but as a team, there was the hive mind. Everyone had the same goal, get the demos finished and don’t fail.
I was in the team working on the navigation mesh level / A-Star path-finding. My job was to rewrite the FBX model system to create the numerous meshes making up the level and to modify the rendering engine accordingly. I decided to write a custom system from scratch, rather than change the old system.
It was 5 days of madness, crunch programming and little sleep, in the end we put our heads together to get the A-Star functioning properly….on the morning it was due in. In the end, we all passed the assignment.
This screenshot is of the final release build of the navigation mesh / A-Star path-finding demo. The red plane is the actual ‘NavMesh’, all the little spheres represent nodes (on the centre of each triangle) and the big sphere represents the agent. A series of lines are rendered to indicate the current path.
Navigation Mesh / A-Star
Lawrence McCauley 