Mine

[raevol]

What's up affine.

[Zini]

Sure you do. It's called incremental solving every frame you check and see if you're closer to your goal, and if so, assume everything is good and you didn't fall off a cliff. As along as the nav mesh is valid (and it should be) then you shouldn't ever assume the paths generated based off it are invalid in any way.

Developing a feature like pathfinding without the ability to test it by actually seeing the actors move around and visually confirming that the pathfinding code doesn't do anything strange, does not sound like a good approach to me.

[affine]

I don't wish to be rude, but how much experience do you have writing AI?

All the AI does is simulate player input. The AI should simulate a player turning towards the next path node, and holding W.

[Chris]

All the AI does is simulate player input. The AI should simulate a player turning towards the next path node, and holding W.

And that's what a character controller resolves, right? Manages "input" for various actors, either from player keypresses or AI, and sets the character state to do something. In Morrowind's case, it would play an animation to move the character. And that also needs physics/collision to properly navigate the world (otherwise it just walks through things).

[affine]

AI shouldn't have anything to do with physics or animation, and yet some people on #openmw tell me this is so.

AI in Morrowind mostly means moving, i.e. walking for your average NPC. Having an NPC walking involves physics and animation.

AI should simulate player input, and nothing more. The animation should be automatic. This was a good read: http://dev.johnstevenson.co.uk/bots/205 ... na-Bot.pdf

The navigation "mesh" is really just a graph that can be traversed by A*. It should have nothing to do with the collision geometry. Collision geometry is far too complex, and is totally different in nature. Nav meshes can be concave and open, whereas collision shapes must be convex and closed. The "mesh" may crudely resemble the physics world, but in reality it's just a hint to the bot as to where it can go and not a hard rule.

Read the link I posted there ^^

Quake 3's bots were revolutionary for its time. The "cognitive model" of the world the bot has, which is internal to the AI, will prevent it from running into obstacles. This model is the graph traversed with A*.

[Chris]

Read the link I posted there ^^

Quake 3's bots were revolutionary for its time. The "cognitive model" of the world the bot has, which is internal to the AI, will prevent it from running into obstacles. This model is the graph traversed with A*.

If you're familiar with this stuff, we could use your help. I can't speak for others, but for me this whole project has been one big learning experience.. this is the first time I've ever done anything like the stuff I'm working on. Having more people that know how these things are supposed to work, both conceptually and in practice, can't really hurt.

(EDIT: and by help I mean actual coding, or providing examples we can work with; something that moves it away from simple theory and makes it more tangible).

[Zini]

I don't wish to be rude, but how much experience do you have writing AI?

Enough. Not with the newest technology. Was all pathgrid then.

All the AI does is simulate player input. The AI should simulate a player turning towards the next path node, and holding W.

Yes, we have been clear about that for ages. What I am saying is, that you need a way to test the AI you implemented in the game. You give a NPC an instruction to walk to a certain location and then see if he does it correctly. And we can't do that, because OpenMW can't move NPCs yet. Actually, we can't even turn NPCs yet.

[ElderTroll]

Tom, you've made my year. I really hope you work on the project. Getting any of those features you mentioned implemented would be a great improvement. After the 1.0 release, you could fork the project. OpenMW would be "compatibilitywind" for legacy work and mod makers and your work could be "advancedowind" with multiplayer and other major changes. The two projects could still share code back and forth as they continue to develop.

[Zedd]

Tom

Tom?

[psi29a]

Tom

Tom?

Yes, Tom Bombadil!