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Index › Discussion › Exhibition › Scent Tracking - A Fast Path Finding Alternative
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Scent Tracking - A Fast Path Finding Alternative (Read 1300 times)
st33d
Scent Tracking - A Fast Path Finding Alternative
Aug 17th, 2009, 12:26pm  
I came up with a scent tracking method based on some AI stuff involving ant bots that I saw years ago.

http://www.robotacid.com/PBeta/scent_map/index.html

It allows you to do some extremely fast path finding by letting the player do most of the work for you.

I've already used it in a commercial platform game and it worked quite well. I was playing Benhem's Wayfarer recently (I'm researching doing a platform game version of Rogue) and was looking at his To Do List, and the mention of smell being a game factor reminded me I hadn't got round to sharing this useful tool yet.
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ben_hem
Re: Scent Tracking - A Fast Path Finding Alternative
Reply #1 - Aug 17th, 2009, 1:05pm  
Hey St33d,

Neat.  If you allow the scent trail to "spread out" by repeatedly setting each grid's scent value (as an int) to (maximum neighbor scent value - 1) and point ants toward increasing scent values, you'll have the entirety of Wayfarer's current track-the-player code.

On a side note, I've been working on A* pathfinding instead, since I'd like to be able to track objects other than the player...demo:
http://benhem.com/dev/aStarDungie
(assumes familiarity with A* / pathfinding terms...press space to toggle dungeon/noisemap mode.)

Also, I was recently introduced to "Langton's Ant," which you might find interesting if you haven't met:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton's_ant

Edit -- just saw your A* page -- I can't get the applet working, but the bit about using an int with a unique "search id" instead of a "closed" bool is a nice touch.  Dijkstra's demo worked fine, by the way.

--Ben
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« Last Edit: Aug 17th, 2009, 7:40pm by ben_hem »  
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jotham
Re: Scent Tracking - A Fast Path Finding Alternative
Reply #2 - Aug 17th, 2009, 5:03pm  
You guys might be interested in this.  Friend has used it in a game to great success.

http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/wiki/Collaborative_Diffusion
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