Back from Paris
The Paris Game AI Conference is over, and what a great conference it was. My favorite talks were Mikko Mononen‘s discussion of local navigation, with his lucid discussion of avoidance techniques (delivered in a very playful manner); Paolo Maninetti’s review of physics-based AI, which included a clear description of how they balance out the complex variables and some very realistic-looking steering samples (if you think they looked robotic, you’ve never seen the precision of race car drivers); and Bruce Blumberg’s review of interaction with animated animals, which was significantly less technical but just as eye-opening. Talks ranged from entertaining to great, but if I had to pick my favorites, those would be it.
It was very serendipitous too. Just last week I was discussing some UnitySteer re-organization with Laurent Lavigne, as the project has been rather abandoned, and he came up with some organization ideas for the code I hadn’t considered before mostly because they’d complicate doing particle-based vehicles, even if the end result would be more Unity-like and probably easier to support and extend. I’ll be reorganizing the project in the next few weeks, which means that you’re likely to see more activity on github, but also that the upcoming development branch is likely to be a work-in-progress.
After that is done, I’ll look into implementing Mikko’s ideas from his local obstacle avoidance and see how well we get them to work.
