Work Post

5:22am - So I ended up sleeping all afternoon and right up until past two am when my roommate went to bed. Now it's the morning and I'm not sure what to do with myself. I kinda want to work but I'm not sure where to start.

I already know a lot about AI, so just reading the text would be boring, but at the same time I'm not sure what would be the most appropriate entry point for me.

Well, let's browse the book and see what catches my eye for now.

5:36am - Hmm... Here's a problem, it's too dark. We've only got the one light in the living room and it's predawn on a snow day. I'm not sure there's anything I can do about that here. I'd like to go out to the McDonalds to work; they should be open now, but the snow is a problem. Whether I try to drive or just walk, I'll be risking the snow getting in my backpack and affecting my computer. Not to mention the effect it would have on me. I don't feel comfortable working in my bedroom either. Shoot.

I've gotten all reved up to go nowhere, it seems.

Work Post

7:15am - It seems as though despite my earlier whinging I was able to pack up and redeploy myself in my bedroom and get some things accomplished. I skimmed over the Movement AI and Steering Behaviors section of the book and poked through the Pathfinding section as well. It was mostly things I've studied before but I haven't fully implemented them myself.

It got me curious how much of this Unity can do out of the box, and what free utilities are available to cover those as well. So, I've opened up a new project in Unity and we'll see what I can do for now.

7:34am - Well there's a lot of AI tools on Unity's asset store, but most of them are for people who don't want to do scripting themselves, or who want to have access to an expert. I already have access to an expert, me, so I'm good on that front.

The other things on the asset store look like I'd have to take them apart to learn how they worked in their specific use case, so I might as well make my own. But that's just the Unity Asset Store. Let's see what I can find outside of that box.

7:39am - Hah, the first hit on github was an open source ai for self-driving vehicles. The second though seems to be just what I was looking for. antonpantev/unity-movement-ai "A Unity library for common movement AI"

8:05am - Yeah these are great. Thanks Anton Pantev!

I'll have to experiment with them to see if I can implement their scripts in with my own but it should work fine.

8:21am - Yeah now that I've given the code a looksee I'm sure I can use this. It's very simple and clean code that works well. I might be able to add to it a bit, but I doubt I could improve it.

Anyways I don't have anything in particular to do with it just now. I just wanted to be sure it was out there and I could find it.

For now I'm going to relax and watch a little more Dragon Ball. The sun's up now and I'm thinking about going out.

8:46am - Yeah it's nice and sunny out. I'm going to pack up and go down to the McDonalds before I work some more. Though I'll admit, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do when I get there. I'm thinking about making a simple 3D Platformer to test out some AI skills, but I'm not sure that's what I want to do.

Well, we'll see how I feel when I get out there.

Work Post

9:34am - I think this is my third Work Post in this waking period. Quite busy today!

I'm at the McDonalds right now, though unfortunately the best spot was taken and I'm stuck with sun in my face. Maybe that's healthy? I don't know. It's hard to see my screen though.

9:47am - Right, McDonalds food eaten to justify my presence here and fill my belly. Now to decide what I'm actually going to do here.

I had been thinking about making my own Unity Movement AI Library but since I found that nice one on Github I mentioned in the previous post, I don't really need to reinvent that wheel.

Let's see what else I can find that someone already made, perhaps?

Chapter 4 in my textbook I'm flying by is on Pathfinding, so let's see what pathfinding is available for Unity. There's navmesh of course, but I'm not sure if that would sync up with this movement library.

10:06am - Boy I wish I had brought something with a sun visor, like my fishing hat. This sun is nuts. Anyways I've googled up a couple things. One turned out to be just about NavMesh, and I've had a hard time finding anything that wasn't about navmesh that seemed useful. That said, I know that the A* implementation I was going off before I jumped rails was based in Unity, so there's that out there too.

10:42am - I got a couple emails that took over a half hour to deal with but that's done, so back to work.

10:47am - This seems like pretty good info: https://arongranberg.com/astar/features

11:24am - I'm being a bit distracted and researching slowly, but that thing I linked is actually pretty neat. There's a free version and a pro version, and they both come with the source code it looks like. I don't think I need anything that the pro version adds, so this might be a nice alternative to basic Unity pathfinding. We'll see when I try it out.

12:55pm - Well after about an hour and a half of research I've determined that the A* Pathfinding Project (for Unity) is good, but there's a bunch of useful features cut out of the free version, that Unity supports out of the box today. I don't know how old the A* Pathfinding Project is but it seems to me the free version is used ideally when you want to use the basic grid type of pathfinding with no jumping. Even their NavMesh solution doesn't seem to handle jumping, while the Unity built-in Navmesh system does. So, I guess I don't need it.

Alas. ^.^;;

It does have some useful movement scripts for handing both types of pathfinding graph, but it says in the documentation many times that you probably will want to roll your own anyways.


1:02pm - I think it's time for me to read from The Book again. Let's see where it takes me next!

1:31pm - I finally reached a part of the book that interested me again, the section on goal oriented behavior, and then I started spacing out. I think it's time to finish up for the day. I'm going to get lunch then go home.