Building upon the Car agent

In the past few days I have taken the car agent and extended it's functionality a bit more now.

The extended functionality includes:

1. It has headlights and looks cool :p

2. The front and the back wheels turn according to the speed of the car. This is achieved by dividing the speed of the car by the circumference of the wheel given by the expression: 

(tz / (3.1415927 * wheel_radius)) * 360

3. The front wheels can now be steered.

4. The motion of the car is driven by the steering of the front wheel. This then decides how much is the car turning based on the steering. In theory now, the whole decision system needs to just interface with this steering module and it can decide where the car is going based on the environment.

Getting till here has been such a great struggle as Massive still keeps crashing. Also, none of the short-cut keys work. So, if I want to alt-connect something to drive the rate for example, I am not able to do that.

Will try to put up the videos of the system that I have created. I managed to do a capture, but it just doesn't work nicely. So still trying to figure that bit out. Here are some samples from what I did till now.

The brain of the Car agent at the current state of development

The wheel spin module

The steering module

The steering-turning module

Will try to get up a video ASAP.
If you are interested in discussing about Crowd Simulation, or Massive, just drop me a line :)

Another day with Massive

Well.. It's getting better. It's not that Massive is behaving better now, it's just that I am getting used to it misbehaving.

It just has a very peculiar way of working, and has unintuitive work-flow. For example, if a node in your scene is not connected to anything and you delete it, you lose the whole network. So, if you want to delete a node, the way I figured out to delete it is that you first connect it to something and then delete it. It's still early days and I might be doing something completely foolish, but the software is just not natural to work with.

I would say it is a beautiful and elegant software design but it's poorly implemented.

OKAY. So with my rant out of the way. I got on with some tutorials and started making this car agent. At the moment, it can just drive around and you have to steer it manually and it can knock over traffic cones.

Here is the basic skeleton of the car agent. Once ready, this agent will be able to move and steer. There are also hubcaps on the wheels so the rotation of the wheels is visible.

Skeleton of the Car Agent to drive its behaviours

 I then went on and put up some blocks to define the car of the agent. In the end I think I will attach some better render geometry to it. These blocks are just for collision shapes for ODE-RBD.

Collision shapes attached to the skeleton for ODE-RBD
(Open Dynamics Engine Rigid Body Dynamics)

This is not really relevant to this post, but just found this screenshot on my machine. This is the Motion Tree of a human agent I am building at the moment. Will talk about in detail later.

Motion tree for an upcoming human agent

Keep watching this space as I would be updating my work on crowd simulation regularly(-ish). 

Massive - Meh

I decided that I am going to do some crowd simulation this year for various projects that I am involved in. The obvious first choice to look at was Massive, as it is talked about a lot and supposed to be good. I have had a few interactions with it, and I would have to say I am NOT very pleased. It crashes at every opportunity and is generally unstable. The UI is not at all intuitive and the 'undo' generally doesn't work. Also, the company is VERY uptight about academic licences.

I think it is a very elegant software design, but very sloppy implementation. Maybe the newer versions are better, but it's just impossible to get hold of them, so I don't really know. Did place a request for a PLE but they flatly refused.

Might be shifting to something like Golaem now or might try to build a AI network in Houdini.

Let's see how it goes.