I have updated the code with an Entity Demo, a Basic Help System and I have enabled the options in the General Options screen, the screenshots below dont really do it justice, but i'll put together a quick vid when I get the chance.
The options screen and the help system are fairly quick and nasty, but they do they job and for a demo like this I think thats fine. The highlight of this update is really the Entity/Agent steering pathing movement demo.
The system is actually alot more complex than it looks on the cover, with the steering system being completely decoupled from the pathing, except for a waypoint list, it generates the required steering forces to move the agent from point to point along the path. The steering and basic movement system is taken from code written by Mat Buckland in 2002, and is basically a 2D oriented steering system that I have modified to work with the demo. It is an expansive system and includes code to handle all kinds of steering behaviours from Path Following, evading/pursuing/hide, seeking/fleeing, obstacle avoidance, non penetration contraints, cell-space partitioning for updates, seperation/cohesion/aligment and various ways/algorithms of calculating the steering force.
The Entity/Agent model itself is the Ogre3D Sinbad model, the new Ogre. The State Machine controlling the entities states, either idling or pathing at the moment(though more are planned) is taken from code originally written by Steve Rabin in 2005. The Entity model is being controlled by a class based on the Ogre3D character sample, for the animation control mainly, which is derived from the steering behaviour and state machine classes to make it an autonomous agent. The state machine is very simple at the moment, though I have plans for expanding it with an "auto" mode in which the agents will have some interaction. Currently, there is an "Idle" mode and a "Pathing" mode. In Pathing mode, the agent will randomly generate paths using Detour on a Recast NavMesh in it's environment, once it has a path, it will switch to a WalkPath state and follow the path. Once it gets to the end of the path, it will switch a flag to tell it to start searching for a new path. In Idle mode, the Agent sits still(it has a bug atm with the state machine message where its velocity wont stay exactly zero as it drops a msg atm, but it only randomly drops it rarely-i have a solution in the works) and switches from a dance animation mode to an idle animation mode to a jumping anim.
Im pushing through the changesets to bitbucket as Im updating this post, but a slow connection means it will take awhile.
Along with the repository download, Ogre3D 1.7 minimum(for the Terrain component) and CEGUI 0.7.1 are required for the project to be built. I used Ogre 1.8 Byatis(unstable) myself, but there should be no problems with using 1.7 .
The repository is a Mercurial repository, and can be best accessed with TortoiseHG from in a windows environment(in my opinion) if you are not a command line expert.
Here is the link to the repository, it is called OgreRecast :
http://bitbucket.org/paulwilson77/ogrerecast
And here is a link to the Wiki, which contains extra information and will be the best place to be kept completely upto date as I muck around with Recast inside Ogre.
http://bitbucket.org/paulwilson77/ogrerecast/wiki/Home
If anybody has any problems getting anything to work, please feel free to ask. All comments and criticism is welcome. If you are interested in contributiong or getting write access to the repo please send me a pm on the bitbucket site with some info on what you want to do etc.
Here are some new screenshots showing the AI Entites on the meshes making paths.
AI Entities Pathing on Ogre Terrain
Sinbad dancing with boredom waiting for the pathing button to be clicked
Pathing on original Recast demo meshes
Basic Help system window
Application Options Window
Original Post
Hello All,
FIrstly, you can find info about Recast/Detour itself here :
http://code.google.com/p/recastnavigation/
Ive been working the past couple of weeks on getting Ogre's new terrain component's geometry into Recast/Detour, including multiple pages and any entities that are on it ( buildings, terrain clutter etc ). I have almost finished putting together a demo app, the code is all working, im just getting rid of the last few bugs and adjusting the materials for the debug drawing so it all looks ok.. Im using manual objects for the debug drawing atm and yes, it makes the frame rate crawl( not important though, as I wont be visualizing the mesh in an actual product ).
I thought I would post this topic, along with some screenies to show what Ive accomplished so far. The code will be available within a day or 2 at most, from a Bitbucket repository that I have setup, though at the moment its only a Visual Studio project ( ill look into makefiles for others, there is no windows dependant code in there so it should run on any platform, though some minor changes may be needed )
Ive stuck to a similar framework to what the Recast Demo itself uses, as that seems the easiest way to visualize the meshes and test everything is working, Ive just added the code for Ogre meshes and terrain. I have used a bunch of functions that I pulled from Ogitor in relation to the terrain blendmapping and importing it from a single large heightmap. This terrain was created from a single 1025x1025 png heightmap image(one of the ones that comes with PLSM2 I think from memory) broken into 4 pages, each 513 verts, 6000x6000 world units, 129 max batch(33 min) - so far the terrain is not loading itself with paging, its just all loading up at once before the "Build NavMesh" button is clicked.
Im using Ogitor myself for laying out scenes and tweaking the new Ogre terrains etc, so it's something that I will probably end up doing when I need it.
