The long path to AI

Heya all!

Long time since my last update, and big changes too.

First, a lot has been going in my personnal life. Ive been struggling to finish my master degree. I am almost there, when that is finished, it should leave me much more time for hobby development. Publishing scientific articles is such a pain... Second, I am changing job! Not only changing job, but changing country and continent too, as I will be moving from Canada to the Netherlands for a very exciting job over there. Yay! Hope I'll have a good time.

Since my last blog update, I have been busy discussing publishing options, and preparing my AI package for external testing. One of these steps was writing the User Manual, so that the kind people helping me test would not feel totally lost. Writing about your work make you realise a lot of things about it. One of the thing I realized writing the manual is that the GOAD tool was not as intuitive to use as I would have thought. It is very intuitive to me, but I see now that its complexity of use might overcome its usefulness for somebody else. So Im currently putting this tool on Idle while I figure out how to make it simpler to use. Maybe replacing it by a less general but simpler Sport AI tool.

Another thing I have been pondering is a comment on the forums. A kind Torque User commented that while the planner tool seems powerful, the best AI is useless without a pathfinding system (for most games). I have to agree, currently there is few pathfinding options for Torque users. My planner demo use a place-holder pathfinding sytem that is not suitable for any practical use. So in the last holidays Ive been working on a nifty pathfinding tool. The tool is based on navigation meshes. 3 steps to use it:

-> Automatically create a navigation mesh from the terrain geometry
-> Adding custom navigation links (doors, ladders, jumping over ledges, etc)
-> Finding paths in real-time in the game

Im almost finished with the first (and most difficult) step. I'll try to upload some images latter. Its been kind of a pain to learn the very various methods of collision detection TGE use, but I learned a lot in the end. Another thing what slowed me down is the Vector class in TGE, which tries to emulate its STL equivalent but really have a lot of flaws, I lost a LOT of time dealing with it, and Im considering banning the thing from my code. For example, when allocating memory, this Vector class does not seem to call the appropriate constructor, and its iterators are, well, deficient. Anyway! Its become a pet peeve of mine. Navigation meshes are really powerful for pathfinding and other AI use, so I think the work will be worth it in the end. Excluding all of the static geometry from the mesh is not all easy, lots of numericals problems there. It already works, but not well enough yet.

I really dont know how complex step 2 will be. I want so start simple and add more as needed.
Step 3 should be a piece of cake, I have done things like that for a long time now.

I think this tool could be usefull to a lot of TGE user, if I can pull it off.

Well, thats it! No idea when everything will finally be ready. Its almost a year since Ive started working on this, Ive been quite busy with the rest of my life, but thats the joy of hobby development. Thanks for everyone's comments and support, and sorry for the people who have been waiting for so long.
To summarize:

Bad news:

-GOAD tool on hold
-Master degree still now finished
-Busy with moving to Europe

Good news:

-Project still ongoing, if slowly!
-Moving to Europe for a new job
-Master degree *almost* finished
-Pathfinding tool in the works