Great - thanks :)

______________________
www.curveaudio.com

interesting!

Very cool. How would users input obstacles? Hopefully your library isn't too easy to use or people will think AI pathfinding is "automatic" ;)

The world as shown in the example sketch has three types of entities -

1. buildings (brick red surrounded by black walls) - use WALL AVOIDANCE
2. obstacles (coloured umbrellas) - use OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE
3. vehicles (anything that moves under the influence of a steering behaviour)

There are two ways to create these entities

1. use standard Java to create the objects and set their attributes
2. describe the entities and their attributes using simple XML files and then get the library to parse the XML file and create the objects for you.

So in this sketch there are 15 buildings which are created and stored in an array with the single statement -

  buildings = Building.makeFromXML( this , "d001_buildings.xml" );

Part of the XML file is shown here
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<buildings>

<building name="Block 1">
    <pos x="0" y = "0" />
    <contour>
        <point x = "0" y = "100" />
        <point x = "50" y = "100" />
        <point x = "150" y = "50" />
        <point x = "250" y = "50" />
        <point x = "300" y = "0" />
        <point x = "0" y = "0" />   
    </contour>
</building>

Notice that the library can cope with buildings with either convex or concave contours. The entities also uses plug-in components for rendering the entities shape which will allow uses to customise their games by creating their own renderers.

I have created a number of libraries and tools for Processing and one of my primary aims is to make them easy to use. If a library is difficult to use then people won't use it. The difficulty will not be creating a steering behaviour but 'tweaking' the different behaviours so that an entity moves as expected.

The library is still a long way off release as I still have a lot of work to do. I created this example as a proof of concept and as a test base for the next stage of development.

Thanks for the positive responces.