United bot navigational data?

[stefanhendriks]

Already discussed elsewhere to try to convert data for various bots. I wonder how the United Bot should handle this?

I'd say, keep it as simple as possible and add data in extra info files. So, the United Bot has only one format , UND (United bot Navigation Data) , which contains x,y,z locations of 'waypoints'.

Why waypoints?

because i think they will be used till the end of time .... despite all inventions on this navmesh thing..

[sfx1999]

How about AAS (area awareness system)?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

a sure thing is that waypoints are certainly the most engine-independent way of doing things. Nothing can stop you to store vector locations to an external file, which is, by nature, engine and game-independent.

However I'm against this. Too simple. And I won't scrap my work on navmeshes and the opportunities it gives me like this.

[stefanhendriks]

I don't ask anyone to scrap work. I just suggest something for the United Bot ...

Its probably not even hard to add your own navigational layer, ie if you have some function

BOT_CreatePath()
BOT_WalkPath()

you can probably just override them with your functions later on anyway. Its just the question, what is the most (best) way of doing this. And i'd say waypoints... in the most naked form ever. X,Y,Z , thats it.

[@$3.1415rin]

but pierre, arent you also storing some sort of information of where your bot might go from one triangle to another ? so to say , paths ? If we do this format in some way extendable, you could store your stuff within this format, so like everybody else. it'd then be only problematic load such a file for your bot which was created by another non bsp bot. but then you could recreate your navmesh ( which is automatically anyway ) and apply the additional data, e.g. statistical stuff like kills, time of kills, damage, whatever to your navmesh.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Yes, in the end, that's always "navnodes", i.e. waypoints ; however they must be so tightly integrated with the mesh to be useful that if the base storage only focuses on waypoint, it'll be a hard time to extend it.

[@$3.1415rin]

nobody said that a flexible, extendable and unified waypoint storage format would be easy

[stefanhendriks]

agreed. I am gonna write a very simple waypoint navigation system. Which CAN be used, but the bots are not obliged to do so.

Perhaps one day its extended to either navmesh or waypoints...