News aggregator

Games engines such as Unity are the perfect platform for agent based modelling, they allow a combination of 3D urban cityscapes and navmeshes/grid graphs/point graphs and local avoidance systems. The A* Pathfinding project features an array of techniques for rapid pathfinding or AI development using a low memory footprint.

Agents in Unity

We have only started exploring the possibilites but the results are intriguing, below features a clip of 15,000 agents using local avoidance, the number could be considerably increased using multiple machines:

A* Pathfinding is available in free and pro versions, it is well worth checking out, we have just upgraded to the pro….

Creating a sandbox style traffic system in Unity is a challenge. As our previous posts have shown agents can use NavMesh and calculate shortest paths but the hit is high on processing which in turn limits the number of agents in a scene. Sander van der Vegte is a multidisciplinary game developer who for the past 12 years has fortunate enough to make a living creating games, part of his current development process is a city traffic game and thus finding ways for natural behaviour while maintaining a low processing requirment.

Unity City Traffic

The clip below is a recording of an autonomous traffic system. Cars drive around while aware of crossings and other vehicles. When something is blocking their path, they will stop. If it takes too long, they will back up and look for another path, the basic ruleset allows for humorous situations:

Traffic system from Sander van der Vegte on Vimeo.

Within the development the user is able to click on a car to take it over while falling off the edge triggers the random camera again.

It is well worth heading over to http://sandervandervegte.nl/ to view his other projects and to keep up to date on City Traffic.

The natural conclusion of our recent posts on Unity and CityEngine is of course a physics/navmesh police chase with the agent target being a drag and drop ball.

Police Car Agents in the City

We will release a version next week on the win/mac platforms for those interested – the aim was to explore shortest path modelling of agents in Unity within an urban scene:

The concept was developed as part of our Masters course here in CASA, to explore the development of 3D interactive urban scenes…