Small pathfinding demo
Last thursday I gave another AI lecture in the Madrid .NET Users Group about pathfinding and steering behaviors. You can find the slides (in spanish) and a navigation demo here. The lecture was first a little of graph theory and explanations and comparisons between depth-first search and breath-first search. Then I jumped into Dijkstra and A*, talking specially about A+, heuristic functions and when you should use Dijkstra and when you should use A*.
The second part of the lecture was about steering behaviors. I took most of my ideas and examples from Craig Reynolds website and the Opensteer project. I showed some examples from Jade tutorials and the Opensteer demo application.
And then lastly I talked a little about how to organize and coordinate AI, putting some examples with the jade cat navigation demo. I talked a little about state machines, goals based behaviors and messaging.
I think most people enjoyed the talk and most of them told me later that they enjoyed a lot the steering behaviors part (Opensteer demo application is a great demo project indeed, very visual and quite fun to see :) I would have loved to spend more time speaking about goal-based behaviors but I didn't have time to do proper research before the lecture.
And that's it, short post today as I have had a very busy week assembling and installing my new PC, but it's now nearly finished :) I only lack some more installations (mostly VS2005 SP for Vista), some data migration from my old laptop and it's ready to go. Next week I'll go in more detail with the navigation demo, explaining the code, how it uses most Jade 1.1 AI namespaces and how I plan to work on them for Jade 2.0