Plan for Xavier "eXoDuS" Amado

In my previous plan I talked how I implemented path finding using a set of predefined way points placed by the mapper. This system works great for interiors, since it gives the mapper full control of how the ai will interact with the map, eliminating the nasty situations when the ai tries to go through places where the nodes could get linked but you couldn't pass through, like a fence, a balcony, etc. Now, that system was flawed if you wanted to use it in an exterior engine like Torque. Why? Simply because it's too big to place nodes one by one, it's time consuming and annoying. Some time ago in a previous game project, I had coded a simple Navigation Graph that autogenerated nodes and links:


This system was good, but the problem was editing it in circunstances where you might not be happy with the autogeneration, it was nearly impossible, since each node in the navgraph was just an engine struct, containing the position and some other information. I hacked together an editor that could add nodes to the navgraph, and update the links, but that was flawed too, getting it to be able to selected and delete a node would be nearly impossible, since they were just points in space.
So here i am in a bored night, with no intention to go to bed, cooking the idea I've been having for some time. What if I mix both ideas? Create a navgraph made of aiWayPoint objects that I used in my other system and allow the mapper full flexibility, by quickly genearating a navigation graph and adding waypoints manually for interiors. It sounded great...


Now, that was cool, but it was getting the world editor very very busy, and annoying to work with, I'm always thinking on end-user usability with my code. So what to do? What to do? Ok, we should somehow hide the navigation graph, I started by hiding the id's for aiWayPoint objects in the WorldEditor code, but after adding lots of if is AiWaypoint code everywhere, I noticed that I was making the worldEditor uglier than it already is! Let's create a new editor then, mmm let's call it... mmm JoeEditor... no no... AIEdtior, yeah that's a cool catching name. Ok, now I had the navGraph not showing at all in the worldEditor and an aiEditor that showed only the navGraph, not the objects. Next obvious step, show the links! After some hacking and screaming at the stupid editor, the links were working, and rendering properly.


The editor shows nodes in red dots and links in green, selected nodes in blue and it's links in red. You can move the nodes around etc. The AI toolbar menu contains an option for Generating the navGraph (in case you modified the terrain, screwed it up, or changed the navGraph settings) and another option for calculating the links (if you moved nodes, added new nodes, whatever).

Of course, neither the navGraph object or the aiWayPoint object does any rendering, nor are they ghosted, it all happens server side (the editor accesses the server side objects directly) so there's no network chewing involved even with big big big navGraphs.

That's about it for now, there's lots more work to put in this puppy, but I'm happy with the results so far, specially for being all done in just one night :p

What do you think? See ya next plan.