So that part in my last post about gestures? Scratch that.
I'm going the way of interactive vector fields. Craig Reynolds has done some really cool work in the field of autonomous agents. Check out his site here http://www.red3d.com/cwr/
In particular, I'm looking at this paper which highlights several ideas behind modeling steering behavior. For the game, I plan to have the player's movements influence a vector field set in a 2D grid. The agents will then use the field to direct their steering behavior, as seen in this applet from Reynolds' site: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/FlowFollow.html
For now, however, I'm working on ways to select a subset of agents using mouse movements. A really nice navigation framework was given to me, and it allows me to focus on the key interactivity of the game, once these smaller details are squared away. Once selection is worked out, I will move to getting the Kinect to work with the nav framework through the use of a nice package from here that was further modified by Raul and Frank, grad students here at Penn.
Next time I'll have a more detailed post as well as a review over what I've done so far.
Marley
I agree that using a vector field would provide better (and by better I mean more intuitive for the user) results. The vector field from red3d reminds me of the MAC grid form the smoke sim. Maybe you could reuse some of that code?
ReplyDeleteHere is the paper that Norm was referring to:
ReplyDeleteCrowdbrush: Interactive Authoring of Real-time Crowd Scenes
it provides an authoring framework to create crowds using a brush like interface.
- you can position agents
- you can color them
- you can draw paths for agents to follow
interesting ideas that you can definitely incorporate into your game (and in my opinion, build upon)